Reduce your Cloud costs with these key strategies

New opportunities due to rapid cloud adoption amongst teams and proliferation of data has opened new challenges for organizations in today’s digital age. Optimizing not just businesses processes but also cloud platforms, its operations, and associated costs is important for improving ROI. This results in improved resource management, transaction volume, better user experience and adoption, resulting in increased business value. Improper cloud cost governance will lead to ballooned inefficiencies, inflated cloud bills, and deaccelerated innovation, with the dangers of organizations becoming less competitive and losing their edge.

Cloud cost optimization deals with financial management through spend analysis and control strategies, to maximize return on investments on cloud endeavors. It is not a one-time cost-cutting measure but is a continuous cycle (monitor-analyze-optimize) for realizing value on every dollar spent.

We have listed below a few of the many strategies to optimize cloud costs –

Centralized Cloud FinOps team enabling decentralized decision making

With the advent of cloud platforms, finance teams no longer control the spending while IT engineers are empowered to spin up resources with a click of a button without any budget considerations. Hence a leadership-approved, centralized, cross-functional FinOps team is needed to forecast budgets, monitor cloud usage, and govern billing rates. This FinOps team comprising of cloud experts responsible for evangelizing best practices is pivotal to the success of any cloud cost optimization journey.

Centralized Cost Monitoring

Organizations continue to struggle to understand cloud expenditures and the granularity of the cloud bills. The cost tools provided by cloud vendors are not enough to provide spend analysis tied to business value or handle multi-cloud or hybrid cloud complications. Hence it is important for teams to create visualizations and dashboards on top of the cloud bills to abstract its complexity and intricacies, and to make it accessible to all stakeholders in real-time.

Efficient Development and Release Cycles

Companies that employ manual deployment and provisioning approaches on the cloud has an inefficient and costly release cycle. Employ DevOps, standardize, automate, containerize, and accelerate risk-free deployments on the cloud, thereby reducing effort and improving efficiency.

Automated Monitoring and Configuration of Resources

Managing delinquent resources is not easy without monitoring and automation. Teams need to optimize resources and plan for shutting down idle resources, spinning down scaled-up resources, removing unused resources, etc. to cut on cloud wastage. Employing Infrastructure as Code (IaaC) with Policy as Code (PaC) helps with seamless and consistent deployment of infrastructure and services on the cloud.

There are many other important strategies which help organizations optimize cloud costs and improve platform efficiency and operations. Organizations should not target to surmount all cost challenges with one strike but consider it as a journey.

Looking to learn more? Our advisory note provides six important strategies to efficiently manage your data and analytics cloud costs.

Read Now