Cloud Cost Management Best Practices

The movement to the cloud has been the most significant megatrend in the IT world for years now. Its allure comes from promises of simplified management and infrastructure and, hopefully, reduced costs.

Despite this promise, cloud spending has only increased. Research firm IDC expects spending on public cloud services to more than double worldwide from 2019 to 2023. Without strong cloud cost management in place, those hopes of lower costs can drift away.

What organizations don’t often account for is the sprawl that can occur when resources aren’t properly purchased or provisioned. Without proper processes, consumers of IT resources can run up a big bill if spending goes unchecked.

A cloud strategy without cloud cost management best practices is doomed to fail and won’t provide the business value expected from a migration.

How Cloud Computing Costs Can Spiral

Moving compute and storage resources to the cloud can seem great at first. Teams can more readily access the resources they need without having to manage on-premises infrastructure. 

But things start to get tricky pretty quickly. Cloud providers will often try to sell organizations add-ons to their deployments, upping the overall cost at the end of the day. And many organizations are utilizing multi-cloud environments where resources are coming from several public cloud providers. This doesn’t even account for private cloud/on-premises resources. 

There’s also the matter of shifting priorities or needs for an organization. When business priorities change, cloud priorities can change as well. This can sometimes lead to resources that keep running while not being utilized. Without a cloud cost management framework in place, your organization will be on the hook for paying for them. 

Organizations may also not be aware of potential discounts or offers from cloud providers that could significantly cut down on the overall resource cost within a cloud cost management framework.

Getting the Most out of Cloud Cost Management

The best way to avoid the pains of these high costs is to utilize a centralized platform to implement all of your cloud management strategies in one place. That includes setting quotas, ensuring workloads are run at lowest cost sites, or decommissioning workloads during off-peak times. This way, efforts aren’t duplicated and stakeholders have one place to go for those resources. Bulk ordering can be set up so resources across common groups of users and teams are easy to acquire with costs staying in check.

Having one central location for these resources can also significantly aid in utilizing cloud cost management tools because it can be centrally-managed by IT to ensure users get the resources they need when they need it, and those resources can be turned off or diverted when they don’t.

It’s also critical to account for economies of scale when it comes to cloud cost management. Things can change rather quickly for organizations of all sizes; they can either become acquired or acquire other entities, or grow on an exponential basis with new offices and branches spread across the globe.

With this in mind, using a platform that allows organizations to configure IT resources through “blueprints” allows for an easily-repeatable and cost-effective format where configurations can just be altered based on needed configuration settings.

Taking this approach to cloud cost management should result in your organization realizing those promised benefits of the cloud. Learn how CloudBolt can help.