Why the Old Way of Cloud Cost Management Has to Go

FinOps pros know the deal. Try as you might, getting your entire organization on board with cloud cost management best practices is extremely difficult.

According to the 2021 State of FinOps report, almost 40% of FinOps pros cannot get engineers who work with cloud resources to factor cost into their decision-making. That slows down innovation, creates unnecessary bottlenecks, and almost certainly causes friction between departments. It’s symptomatic of old, ingrained and painful ways of doing cloud cost management.

What Problems the Old Way of Cloud Cost Management Brings

Specifically, cloud cost management breakdowns often lead to these problems:

A monthly curse of trying to reconcile people and initiatives with billed spend. The old way of cloud cost management requires you to separately log into every public cloud portal and reach out to multiple departments and untold numbers of people, just to hopefully find out who used what resource at what time and for how much. Does this sound like a fun way to spend a day? Or, more likely, a week…or more?

Endless spreadsheets. You may love spreadsheets as much as the next person. But when it comes to figuring out cloud spend, you can drown in them and never come up for air. Traditional cloud management requires analyzing multiple tabs of data on spreadsheets, a process that’s about as fun in reality as it sounds.

Monthly bills and finance challenges. Poring over monthly bills line-by-line is another reality with the old way. At the same time, finance has to manage rogue spending and a lack of governance. This causes headaches up and down the line.

One pattern you’re probably noticing here: so much of the old way is reactive. There’s too much focus on reconstruction of what happened in the previous month or quarter and then picking up the pieces later. It’s a truly backwards way of conducting any form of business. The truth is: things have advanced. There’s a new way to do cloud cost management, one that emphasizes ongoing optimization, automation, and uses actionable data to get smarter about costs.

Learn more about the new, intelligent way to do cloud cost management in our new infographic.