Before we jump into cloud cost optimization, let us address the elephant in the room. Businesses are moving to the cloud but are struggling with unpredictable cloud bills. If you are a business owner who has moved to the cloud recently, you need to understand each cloud touchpoint and get a transparent view of your cloud services.
When it comes to cloud cost optimization, there are many tools and techniques that organizations can adopt. Most of these can only take you so far. However, there are certain essential principles that businesses, no matter the size, must follow to make sure they’re getting the best out of their cloud investments.
What is cloud cost optimization?
Cloud cost optimization refers to the set of strategies, best practices, and tools, including CloudSpend, aimed at minimizing expenses and maximizing the value derived from cloud investments. While cost reduction is a key aspect, it is important to note that cloud cost optimization is not solely about cutting costs. It also involves aligning expenses with the organization’s business objectives. In some cases, increasing costs may be acceptable if they lead to a proportional rise in revenue. The ultimate goal is to strike a balance between cost efficiency and maximizing the benefits of cloud technology for the overall business.
Challenges of endless cloud
Organizations that have moved to the cloud are often intrigued by the unlimited resource capacity it has to offer, hoping to gain a strategic advantage by experimenting and innovating with the latest technology.
Consequently, organizations struggle to curb their cloud costs and wonder if they made the right decision to move to the cloud in the first place. This shouldn’t be the case for a growing organization looking to innovate with the newest technology because it discourages new ideas.
Cloud cost optimization best practices
CloudSpend’s cloud cost optimization strategy links costs to specific Business Units, giving you a granular view of the spend analysis of your cloud budget. This cost visibility will help you allocate more to cloud resources with a higher ROI and reduce unnecessary costs to a bare minimum.
1. Proactively right size resources
Oversized instances are a common problem cloud architects face after they have signed up for different cloud services. For instance, say you sign up for an oversized Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instance. If, after a point, developers leave that instance running idle, the cost will eventually increase. It just takes an unchecked EC2 instance to spin a hefty cloud bill for the organization. CloudSpend helps you identify these budget overhauls due to unplanned provisioning of resources. Further, IT Automation can perform actions like suspend, restart, or commit a service for an effective budgeting cycle.
2. Align your budgeting with business goals
A major factor in controlling costs is making sure everyone understands the organization’s cost requirements. The budgeting feature in CloudSpend helps you do that. It keeps the allocated budget in check and perform actions whenever a budget threshold is breached. You can also create your budget policies aligned to your business goals.
3. Forecast well in advance
Having forecasts in place based on historical data helps you spend mindfully and avoid wasting money on unnecessary resources. With Forecast for Business Units, you can obtain an estimated total bill amount for your chargeback entities for the current month based on your past usage.
4. Implement a custom resource optimization strategy
In-depth analysis into resource-level spending will give you a clearer picture of where you are spending in excess. It could be a case of one resource hogging an entire infrastructure’s spending, but this can be difficult to spot with an overall spending view. CloudSpend’s Resource Explorer gives you a detailed view into resource-level spending. View your costs by account, region, service, or even tag, paving the way for an effective resource optimization strategy. With Resource Explorer, you easily gain in-depth analysis of how each cloud resource is contributing to your cloud costs.
5. Put the data to good use
Using data the right way can be a challenge, especially in a multi-cloud environment. CloudSpend provides custom reports, such as budget alerts, trend analysis, and Resource Explorer. You will be able to make informed business decisions with these reports and save on cloud costs. You can also get periodic scheduled reports, giving you flexibility at the Business Unit level. With CloudSpend’s multi-currency support, changed reports to show how much you may end up spending in your desired currency.
These best practices will help you understand cloud cost optimization and make strategic decisions. If you are a business owner, this is your first step in moving from cloud cost optimization to cloud cost intelligence. CloudSpend empowers you to understand your cloud ecosystem and aligns costs with teams, customers, and Business Units so you know where to pull the strings to balance costs with system performance.
