How to save money when using the cloud

We’ve already covered the many ways that studios can save money using cloud-based workflows over traditional ones (see here and here). That said, once you’ve switched to a fully cloud-based workflow, there are still additional ways to optimize your savings, keeping projects on — or under — budget. Here’s five of them:

Use proxy workflows

‍
While the benefits of cloud-based workflows often make proxies unnecessary, continuing to use them just like you’re used to in traditional workflows will help your studio save on storage space, which means less cost. You may also be able to use less powerful (and therefore cheaper) workstations to get your editing done. By continuing to use a familiar process, your studio can save big while still taking advantage of all of the collaborative and remote editing opportunities that cloud-based workflows provide. When you need more power to get through a heavy project or export, all it takes is the flip of a switch to upgrade your workstation and take advantage of the cloud’s full power.

Use only the power you need

‍
For certain projects, you might not need that high-powered, limit-pushing workstation. In some instances, the bottleneck is no longer the CPU, GPU, or RAM of your workstation, and having a higher-powered workstation won’t really help. But, when you do need more speed or power, it’s always available, and in some cases, scaling up will save you money. Take the example of one of our customers, who had a desperate client who needed their video… and needed it NOW! (We’ve all been there…) 

Anyways, he needed to export a project — and export it fast. While he did the majority of his editing on our “slower” 4K workstation, the export was estimating that it would take 4 hours… this wasn’t going to cut it. Since Suite makes it easy to scale your workstation, he scaled up his power and boom… the video was exported and on the way to the client in just under 20 minutes.

Active vs. inactive storage
‍

On the cloud, active storage is more expensive. For studios looking to cut costs, transferring inactive files and projects to another cloud-based storage solution (like dropbox, google drive, etc) can save them lots of money, without sacrificing too much time. Cloud-to-cloud transfers operate at much higher speeds and take much less time than local-to-cloud ones, so if you don’t really need those assets on hand, you can save yourself a lot of money by having access to just what you need, right now.

‍

Optimize your workstations

‍

With Suite in particular, your workstations are optimized, with features like auto-shut off, to keep them from accidentally running and eating up money overnight. Suite handles everything behind the scenes, ensuring that everything is set up correctly in the cloud. Our customers never experience surprise fees or egress costs (the costs of moving files between cloud-based and local locations) and can focus on what they love, creating.

Use Suite

‍
For studios looking to make cloud-based workflows more affordable, there’s no better solution than Suite. We save you the time, money, and hassle that can come from setting up your own cloud-based solution, and we do it all with transparent and fair pricing that you know ahead of time thanks to our pre-paid workstations and fixed monthly storage costs.