Cloud cost optimization can be incredibly complex — but it doesn’t need to be. The task of managing your business’s cloud can seem daunting as resources build up in your corporate account. Understandably, this can lead to cloud sprawl and other cases in which you are overspending on the cloud.
Not every business will have the time and resources to analyze its monthly cloud bills and keep its cloud infrastructure cost optimized at all times. To better understand how you can avoid overspending on the cloud, let’s explore some of the challenges associated with cloud cost optimization and how cloud cost optimizations tools can help you reduce cloud costs.
Lack of visibility into cloud spend
A common problem that many businesses face is cloud sprawl. Cloud sprawl refers to the uncontrolled growth of cloud instances, cloud services, or even cloud providers, and it occurs when a business fails to properly monitor and manage its cloud computing resources.
Without the proper tools, how can you monitor your cloud costs accurately? When you can’t accurately view billing data or cloud spend data over time, it becomes difficult to make cost-related decisions. This lack of visibility into your cloud computing resources has direct cost implications.
For a start, you need a proper dashboard, or you risk having visibility problems that lead to cloud cost leaks. In order to properly optimize, monitor, and manage your cloud resources and costs, consider investing in a cloud cost optimization tool with an intuitive dashboard that does all the above.
Inaccurate or misleading budget cloud cost forecasting
Without a dashboard that consolidates all your cloud cost optimization opportunities in a central location, you’re left with the native cloud platforms to access such essential data, which may not fit with your needs. Take AWS, for example, which provides a feature to control cloud costs through autoscaling.
Autoscaling allows you to automatically scale certain cloud services like virtual machines based on parameters you set, such as traffic or usage levels. But even with such features available, forecasting cloud costs is not so easy or clear-cut. It is important to also take into account new cloud services and apps that could cause fluctuations in monthly costs.
Instead of spending additional time and resources in setting up new processes and workflows to acquire the right data for forecasting, use a cloud cost optimization tool with advanced forecasting abilities that can intelligently predict your future cloud bills.
Misaligned approaches to cloud saving plans across teams
Your cloud cost optimization efforts shouldn’t be one-sided. In other words, each team or department within your organization should not have their own approach to managing cloud resources and cloud costs.
While DevOps and engineering teams lead the development of services within an organization, they do not always take cloud cost optimization into consideration since they need that cost flexibility to deliver their best.
Not every business has a separate cloud strategy team to keep everyone in check. That’s why it makes sense for finance and business and IT managers to work together and be aligned in their policies to successfully manage cloud costs. Approving budgets is, after all, based directly on cloud spending forecasts.
Billing complexity and cloud cost breakdowns
In most cases, monthly cloud bills are incomprehensible and are riddled with technical specifications that make them unreadable for your finance team. Gartner’s research even suggests that “95% of business and IT leaders find cloud billing the most confusing element of using public cloud services.”
It becomes complicated when you’re utilizing multiple cloud providers or adopting a hybrid cloud model, which comes with the added challenge of having multiple ways in which cloud costs and usage are reported. This leads to even more confusion and oversight in your road to cloud cost optimization.
Additionally, most cloud service providers can and will change their billing practices over time. This means that your cloud invoices can differ vastly from one month to the next, meaning you’d need to go through a whole new set of cloud bills.
Cloud cost optimization tools can help comb through the parts of the bill that drive up the costs, ultimately helping in eliminating cloud waste. By breaking down your cloud bills that differ from month to month (anomalies), these tools allow you to pinpoint where cloud wastes lie and make changes to optimize your cloud spend.
Limited options involved for cloud optimization
Cloud cost optimization includes many of the features made popular by native cloud platforms and other cloud management tools such as automation and autoscaling used for rightsizing containers and instances. While they can go a long way in cutting down cloud costs, cloud cost optimization doesn’t end there.
Cloud cost optimization tools can identify and study anomalies over time to alert your teams when abnormal spending occurs. This can be done through an intuitive dashboard that highlights your cloud cost drivers. There are also dashboards that offer action plans suited to your cloud cost optimization needs.
Grumatic is an example of a tool that is ready to offer you 80+ best practice recommendations so that you don’t need additional experts or experience to start saving on cloud costs. Grumatic offers “one click saving,” meaning you can implement these cost saving actions plans within seconds.
Conclusion
Business and IT managers must be diligent when it comes to cloud cost optimization. In 2019, almost two-thirds (64%) of companies in one study tried to lower their cloud spending, and it’s safe to say that likely holds true today. Without proper monitoring and management, businesses can easily lose control of their cloud costs.
An intuitive dashboard will provide the necessary visibility to cut down on costs and provide guidance on the best cost saving practices to implement. Other challenges, such as billing complexity and forecasting, really depend on the actual cloud cost optimization tool you choose.
Contact us today and try Grumatic!
