06.11.18
5 Min read
Book a Demo
For enterprises, managing cloud costs has become a huge problem.
Public cloud continues to grow in popularity and top providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google, offer competitive prices to attract enterprises. But your search to save money shouldn’t stop there. There are many factors — some of which IT teams initially overlook — that can increase a public cloud bill. Fortunately, organizations can avoid any unwanted billing surprises with a smart cloud cost management strategy.
Enterprises progressing through their cloud adoption need to ensure that they have cost management strategies in place to control their spend as they continue to migrate services to cloud providers. In this article we’ll take a look at cloud costs management strategies you can use to reduce your cloud costs immediately.
Cloud infrastructure offers many benefits for organizations, but it also presents some challenges. It’s easy to see the benefits (scalability, control, security etc.), but it’s also important to understand how moving to the cloud impacts your organization.
A major problem that contributes to cloud cost management challenges is the difficulty organizations have tracking and forecasting usage. The survey conducted for the SoftwareONE Managing and Understanding On-Premises and Cloud Spend report found that unpredictable budget costs was one of the biggest cloud management pain points for 37% of respondents, while 30% had difficulty with lack of transparency and visibility.
Evaluating costs before migration
Before you move youe infrastructure to the cloud, it is important to evaluate how much the public cloud will cost. Like any IT service, the public cloud can introduce unexpected charges.
The first step of a cloud cost management strategy is to look at the public cloud providers’ billing models. Take note of how much storage, CPU and memory your applications require, and which cloud instances would meet those requirements. Then, estimate how much those applications will cost in the cloud. Compare your estimates to how much it currently costs to run those apps on premises. Some workloads are more cost-effective when in-house due to data location and other factors.
Preparing for multi-cloud costs
When using multiple public cloud providers, integration and other factors can lead to unexpected fees. Think ahead and plan application deployments to see where you might incur additional costs. Also, look at your cloud bill and see what you are charged for access, CPU and storage. The ability to track spending across more than one cloud is invaluable.
Selecting the right vendor and avoiding vendor lock-in
Before you commit to a cloud vendor, you have to understand your business requirements, and examine what a certain vendor is offering. At first glance, most vendors have similar packages and prices, but when you examine them in detail, you can discover, for example, that one vendor has dramatically lower price for certain types of workloads.
Organizations should also avoid vendor lock-in. Moving workloads from one cloud vendor to the other can sometimes be difficult. Organizations sometimes end up paying higher prices than necessary because they didn’t do their homework upfront, and it is too difficult to migrate applications or workloads after they are in production.
To reduce your cloud costs, you must first identify waste by uncovering inefficient use of cloud resources. Cloud cost management is not a once-and-done process, but you can immediately start saving money on your cloud infrastructure costs if you address key areas that account for the majority of wasted cloud spend and budget overruns.
If you’re looking for a more in-depth guide to reducing cloud costs, please visit our cloud cost optimization guide.
Cloud cost management is one of the major pain points various organizations have when migrating to the cloud. Cloud costs can sometimes be difficult to estimate, due to the complexity of the cloud infrastructure. If you have any questions about how we can help you optimize your cloud costs and performance, contact us today to help you out with your performance and security needs.
Schedule a call with our experts. Discover new technology and get recommendations to improve your performance.