By keeping IT infrastructure on cloud, organizations have access to a series of benefits, such as scalability, control, and security. However, this strategy also requires some attention.
One factor that challenges cloud computing cost management is the difficulty to track and predict its usage. In this context, unpredictable expenses may become one of the biggest problems in cloud management.
Currently, this challenge may be shared between finance, IT, DevOps and other sectors within the company. These professionals must together understand, manage, and optimize cloud computing costs.
According to the State of the Cloud Report, by Flexera, organizations extrapolate cloud expenses in 23% when compared to their initial budget. Besides, interviewees estimate that organizations waste 30% of its monthly expenses.
Therefore, planning strategies to optimize cloud costs is an urgent matter. In this content, we will present a few tips on how to immediately reduce cloud management costs and work smarter with this innovative tool.
Main reasons for the lack of proper cost management in the cloud
To manage cloud costs has become a big challenge for organizations, and controlling is a priority. According to the report previously mentioned, 73% of organizations plan to optimize cloud usage expenses with the purpose of reducing it.
The lack of proper cloud cost management usually happens for one of these three reasons:
Decentralization of cloud resources consumption
Besides IT, people from other departments, such as marketing, may adhere to cloud resources. With decentralized purchases, consumption is bound to increase.
The “low cost” of cloud resources may be deceiving
Some resources will cost you only cents, which looks insignificant to the person hiring it. However, at the end of the day, the accumulated bill might be high.
Lack of IT governance
The lack of processes, rules and well-defined budget could lead to an uncontrolled scenario. For example, it is common to identify companies paying for underused resources. A consistent IT governance politic could avoid such wastes.
5 tips on how to reduce cloud management expenses
Build IT security and governance guidelines
Building a governance politic that can integrate people, processes and tools is fundamental for controlling expenses. For example, defining clear rules, budgets and especially a way to manage cloud consumption is essential.
Additionally, security also plays an important role. For example, to guarantee that only authorized users have access to certain instances is a security measure that also allows control over cloud costs.
Identify the sources of waste
To reduce cloud costs, you must first identify waste, mapping the efficient usage of resources. By approaching specific areas of the organization responsible for this waste, the cost with cloud infrastructure decreases.
Guarantee visibility of cloud expenses for the IT department
It is impossible to optimize something that cannot be quantified or seen. One study showed that 75% of IT professionals state to not have visibility over cloud resources. This situation prejudices an efficient management, allows unnecessary payments, and increases cloud computing costs.
The tip here is to invest in environmental analysis and organization, classifying resources per group or using tags. That way, managers will have a clear consolidated vision of their expenses and will be able to identify improvement opportunities.
Take advantage of automations
Every provider accepts some level of automation. It is important to take advantage of the tool’s full potential to generate routines that decrease costs.
One example is to decrease Virtual Machine’s sizes during the night to the least, or disactivate completely its services during the weekend. This will save costs during business’ idle times.
Outsource cloud resources management
To facilitate resources management and enjoy the cloud’s full potential efficiently, it is important to get support from specialists that deal with this issue every day.
By outsourcing this service to specialized partners the organization can track the usage and costs with cloud resources, setting budgets and expenses limits, and getting notifications when such limits are reached.
To implement an efficient cloud computing and resources strategy, count on the help of specialists. Talk to one of our consultants on how to implement or optimize your cloud resources and other innovation opportunities for your business!