Cost controls affect every aspect of a business, and controlling the cost of cloud computing is no exception. The purpose of implementing a cloud cost management strategy is to optimize your business’s financial resources. There is no room for squandering even a penny of your company’s funds.
There is an assumption that the key to cloud success is technology, but it depends on your ability to control your cloud costs. Managing expenses effectively requires identifying and understanding all of the different elements that impact your cloud costs so that you can leverage cloud cost management tools to uncover inefficiencies. A lot of unplanned expenses result from a lack of visibility about current consumption patterns and historical trends, poor organization, unclear development processes, or the lack of automated deployment and configuration tools. Cloud consumption is a daily operational expense, unlike on-premise infrastructure. The nature of unfixed daily recurring expenditures means you will need to change your approach to executive management significantly. The cost will become equally as important as optimizing performance.
Ways to Lower Your Cloud Costs
Cost Analytics
It is essential to use analytics to understand what you have spent historically, as well as what you will spend currently and in the future. The first step to gaining that insight is to get total visibility on the cloud services you are using. It would be best if you had visibility into the actual usage patterns as well as cost trends. You will need both granular and consolidated details, including interactive graphical and tabular reports covering multiple dimensions, and time frames in a multi-cloud environment so you can correlate data for analysis and reporting against your business objectives.
Visibility
About 75% of all IT professionals surveyed report their biggest problem is that they do not have a profile of their cloud resources. Without visibility into the cloud, it can cause poor management of those resources. To gain visibility into your funds, the place to start is with an in-depth analysis of your entire infrastructure. Search for support in the cloud not being used because they are not being seen, yet you are still paying for them. Allowing those resources to continue on unused cuts into your infrastructure savings and other financial benefits the cloud can bring.
Controlled Stack Templates
Cloud computing enables your DevOps team to have more autonomy in over-provisioning resources than traditional IT environments. This is a great benefit, but decentralized organizations can produce non-standard security rules and convoluted configurations that, in turn, drive up costs. Therefore, it is essential to implement automation and process best practices that include using predefined stack templates. Administrators can see to it that security, network, and instance, family/size configurations are part of the stack templates. The process of deploying instances is faster, but still aligned with the Departmental user’s roles and privileges ensures only certain specific resources are provisioned.
Automated Alerts and Notifications
Automatic alerts and notifications can help you stay informed about day-to-day changes in your environment. They also provide visibility about increases in costs, authorization failures, and budget overruns. Using standard and custom reports that offer details about costs, usage, and performance can help you with critical decisions.
Budgets
It is crucial to define and allocate budgets for departments, projects, and cost centers. It is equally essential to Implement approval mechanisms to avoid cost overruns. You can use alerts to keep you informed about when thresholds are breached. It is an ongoing process to manage the balance between cost and value. Still, the exercise and discipline of cloud cost management will ensure your enterprise optimizes the benefits cloud computing can deliver.
Governance by Policy
With the proper policies in place, you can use cloud-based governance tools to track cloud usage and costs and alert administrators when the total usage for your cloud account is more significant than a specified value or when the overall usage for a vendor-specific product exceeds a specified amount which can help you control cost. You must schedule your operational hours to shut down & start virtual machines automatically. You can avoid cost overruns by implementing policies that terminate temporary servers created to handle huge workloads. You should use integrated data sources, custom tags, and metadata to define rules that lead to improved management, reporting, and optimization.