Cloud cost management can be beneficial for your business, however, there are a lot of nuances to it. Read on to find out more about cloud cost management, its benefits and what strategies you could implement for your business.
What is cloud cost management?
Cloud cost management is the process of monitoring, optimising and controlling the costs associated with using cloud computing resources. It involves identifying, analysing and reducing unnecessary expenses related to cloud services, such as storage, computing power, network usage and data transfer.
Why is cloud cost management important?
By implementing cloud cost management strategies, your business can reduce its overall cloud costs and maximise your return on investment (ROI) for cloud services. It’s an essential tool if you’re wanting to optimise your cloud usage, reduce your spending and improve your overall performance and security.
What are the benefits of cloud cost management?
As well as cost savings, some of the biggest benefits of cloud cost management include:
- Improved Budgeting: With cloud cost management, organisations can better forecast their cloud expenses and allocate budgets accordingly, improving their financial planning.
- Increased Visibility: It also provides organisations with greater visibility into their cloud usage and expenses. This enables them to make more informed decisions about their cloud infrastructure and services.
- Better Resource Utilisation: Cloud cost management can help organisations to identify underutilised resources and optimise their usage, leading to improved resource distribution.
- Enhanced Security: It can also help organisations to identify and address potential security vulnerabilities in their cloud infrastructure, allowing for enhanced security and compliance.
What are some common cloud cost management strategies?
Some of the most frequently used cloud cost management strategies include:
- Rightsize Underutilised Resources: This involves altering the size and number of the cloud services you pay for to match what you actually use.
- Monitor Cloud Cost Anomalies: This involves taking note of patterns of use to find unexpected spikes, which could be due to a billing error or misconfigured resources, for example.
- Leverage Spot Instances: This lets you get a better rate by bidding on spare cloud capacity.
- Configure Fixed Uptime and Downtime Schedules: This means you only pay for the resources that you need by identifying when exactly your resources should be active and if there are any times where resources could be shut down.
- Use the Right Storage Systems: This takes into account performance, security and scalability to choose the most efficient option for your business.
How can I reduce my cloud costs?
There are a whole host of ways that you can cut down on cloud costs, these include:
- Aligning storage redundancy with requirements.
- Reducing any unneeded storage capacity.
- Identifying idle computer resources.
- Optimising network configurations.
What are the challenges of cloud cost management?
While cloud cost management is an effective solution, there are a few challenges that you should be aware of.
Lack of visibility is one of the issues you are likely to face. It directly impacts cloud cost optimisations as being unable to monitor your cloud service usage means it can be very difficult to make cost-related choices. Another issue is over-provisioning, which means you end up paying for more resources than you actually require.
Multilayered billing and confusing cost breakdowns are also common problems, although professionals can help you with all of these issues.
Best Practices for Cloud Cost Management
There are some issues that can be easily avoided with correct cloud cost management. Follow this checklist of best practices to follow:
- Regularly review any bills or pricing information that shows what you are paying for.
- Set budgets and be sure to adhere to them.
- Identify any resources that are going unused to avoid overspending.
- Right size the services to avoid having too many or too few resources at any one time.
How can I optimise my cloud spending?
The best way to optimise your spending on cloud services is to use cloud cost management strategies which can help you to identify areas where you are overspending for things that you do not use that much.
How can I ensure that my cloud costs remain predictable?
For a business, having predictable costs is essential for your budgeting and cashflow. A few ways to keep costs regular are through capacity planning or limiting data transfer fees. If you cannot avoid these, however, then using a cost monitoring tool like cloud cost management is the best solution.
How can I align my cloud costs with my business goals?
A specialist in cloud cost management can use techniques including checking that you are using the right strategies to align your payment for cloud resources with your business goals.
How can I effectively manage multiple cloud providers and services?
There are apps available to help you take control of a multi-cloud environment. This way you can get the best of a range of providers to fit your business needs.
What is the difference between cloud cost management and cloud cost optimisation?
Cloud cost management consists of analysing cloud spending and using insights to find ways to reduce costs. Cloud cost optimisation offers more than just savings. It allows you to align costs with business goals in order to increase revenue, meaning you may not have to make cuts.
Final Thoughts
With more and more businesses utilising cloud computing, possibly with a limited understanding of what they’re actually paying for, it’s essential to take steps to monitor and adjust costs accordingly. By implementing a cloud cost management strategy, you can ensure your business isn’t overspending and hurting your bottom line.
Why choose Eventura to cloud-enable your business?
Eventura have been helping businesses in their digital transformation journey for two decades. From the implementation of industry-leading cloud ERP solutions such as Sage 200 and NetSuite, to helping them move their entire operations to the cloud and away from costly and restrictive on-premise solutions.
As well as being NetSuite Solution Providers, Sage 200 Partners and Microsoft Gold Partners, we also offer a wide range of managed IT services, meaning we can take your business as a whole and help it achieve digital transformation.
If you would like to speak to one of our experts, you can request a free call back here.
