Three Ways Cloud Cost Management Tools Can Curb Cloud Sprawl

Can cloud cost management tools help your organization to manage cloud sprawl? 

Cloud sprawl has become a major concern for enterprises. The thing is, building in the cloud is elementary. IT can add features and services on the fly. But this often leads to unneeded, abandoned, or forgotten workloads that add wasteful costs to the cloud bill. 

Failure to rein in cloud sprawl by enacting effective management measures is a missed opportunity for modern-day enterprises. Consequently, IT needs to develop a comprehensive cloud management strategy and explore tools to deal with sprawl. 

Here’s how cloud cost management tools can help organizations deal with sprawl in the cloud. 

Implement Centralized Cloud Management

A Cloud Management Platform (CMP), such as CloudBolt, can help your organization get an initial handle on sprawl in your cloud environments. With such a tool in place, you can implement a management and governance strategy. This strategy will guide your stakeholders, managers, operations teams, and developers through the whole application life cycle. 

CMPs give IT a unified view to monitor workloads across clouds to track development, production, and test environments. In addition, IT can conduct regular resource audits through the CMP to help keep cloud sprawl at bay. A typical cloud audit includes applications, storage, compute, and other infrastructure components.

A proper audit also considers potential risks and necessary security updates. Compliance and security teams need to look at vulnerabilities, examine them, and develop a risk management framework that will address them.

CMPs also enable organizations to implement self-service cloud brokerage. This comes with a pre-approved catalog of services to help deal with cloud sprawl. Brokerage gives IT the budgeting and governance tools needed to govern and monitor the cloud usage of developers. 

Secure Access and Manage Critical Resources and Applications

Start by prioritizing secure access to cloud resources, in particular, business-critical applications. In the past, very few people, primarily DevOps teams, had access to cloud infrastructures. Today, more and more people interact with cloud infrastructures within organizations, so managing access is critical. Deploying applications and making engineering changes to cloud infrastructure has now become commonplace. 

Keeping track of applications is not a straightforward process. As cloud usage evolves and applications multiply, assumptions about the most suitable applications are often wrong. In a bid to keep up, enterprises need to monitor increases in the applications’ usage over time. As a result, it becomes easier to prioritize and ensure the availability of the most critical applications and guarantee optimal user experience. There is controlled access to the application to keep errors at a minimum. 

Cloud Optimization 

Monitoring cloud spending is not the preserve of the finance department. Cloud cost management tools can docket spending across all your cloud deployments. You can use these tools to optimize spending and get actionable insights such as CloudBolt’s Kumolus Cost Optimization product.

Your Cloud Deployment Isn’t Doomed to Sprawl

Cloud sprawl is not an inevitable outcome of your move to the cloud. Proper strategy and planning can help your organization to avoid cloud sprawl. Setting the right guardrails and using cloud cost management tools is a foundational step toward combating sprawl. 

See the latest cloud cost management tools from CloudBolt today.