Rationalizing Cloud Costs For Maximum Effectiveness

The finance dept approves budgets and resource allocations, plus it implements chargeback and showback models. Here are some of the best practices that will help you manage your Cloud costs and work within your budget. In the fall of 2018, Adobe raked up a whopping $80,000 a day in unexpected cloud charges on a project that the development team was running on Azure, a cloud computing platform by Microsoft. This way, members of the CCoE can make more precise decisions about which applications lead to quick return on investments and therefore should be migrated at an earlier stage. Moreover, it helps identifying applications for which a cloud strategy does not implicate any financial benefits.

The keyword here is “right-sizing” all services according to their actual consumption. Acropolium is an experienced technology partner with decades of expertise in cloud computing. Our team carried out over 93 successful cloud migrations and reduced cloud bills for many logistics and transportation, healthcare, and HoReCa companies.

The price of cloud computing can skyrocket as you use more storage and resources. Most enterprises don’t know how to reduce these expenses because of the complex provider bills and analytics. Thankfully, effective cloud cost optimization and financial management practices can help you avoid chaos. Cloud cost management is not just an operational concern or merely about “cost reduction”; it’s a https://globalcloudteam.com/ value-driven strategic move. The path toward it will not be linear and requires tight collaboration among governance, architecture, operations, product management, finance and application development to be successful. As DevOps has revolutionized the development processes, a good cloud cost optimization framework and FinOps can similarly help businesses realize the cloud’s real business value.

Multi-tenant infrastructure is usually more profitable for startups and small businesses, while single-tenant environments have better uptime and security. Now, why is it important to focus on the efficient use of cloud resources? Just because an enterprise farms out the processing of data into the cloud, does not mean that it should neglect, or dispense with, the administrative functions.

Major cloud vendors offer native tools to help you classify resources. That’s why companies should add a tagging strategy to track resource spendings across all their projects and accounts. FinOps is a collaborative, data-driven way of managing cloud spend that allows finance, IT and the business to manage at speed.

Cloud Cost Optimization: A Pivotal Part Of Cloud Strategy

The budgeting and strategic planning still must be done in-house because the vast majority of the IT department is still there. In the past, Giant corporations have found themselves in murky waters with gut-wrenching cloud bills. CloudFront CDN offers you free 50GB of outbound data transfer for the first 1 year and 2,000,000 HTTP or HTTPS requests free for each month for a duration of 1 year.

Business, IT and finance teams must all be on the same page, and upskilled across the board. Finance must have an understanding of the dynamics of managing technology; and P&L owners must interpret spend across the whole IT stack, including additional elements of the CSP offering. The optimization framework allows companies to measure how their teams use resources. You can then use this data to allocate budget between departments, build strategic initiatives, and help employees understand how to reduce cloud costs. The business must be able to track how money is spent on cloud , plan how much money to spend in the future and secure payment from various business units for cloud services provided . How well these activities are performed will determine how well the business can control cloud costs.

Cloud cost forecasts are always calculated based on up-to-date prices and for the latest cloud products. The Cloud Knowledge Engine is continuously growing and contains prices, host locations, certifications and mappings with on-premises legacy services. For example, you shouldn’t use this strategy for production workloads and services without data persistence because you can lose the data created between sessions. Your scheduling policy needs to match the expected usage patterns based on historical data. Alternatively, you can configure the system to turn these instances off when the usage is low. For example, the provider can offer negotiated and programmatic discounts for higher upfront payment or commitment to use their service for an extended time.

Three Design Principles For A Holistic Cloud Finance Management Framework

On-the-side governance, where departments and specialists can control resource allocation via a native cloud interface according to the governance policies. Larger enterprises can encounter difficulties during allocation management if multiple departments share platforms. These stakeholders should collaborate to determine critical metrics and governance policies for managing cost optimization practices. In some cases, traditional solutions can limit your productivity, which will only add to your expenses. Cloud optimization allows you to leave primary instances your staff needs to get things done and disable the unnecessary ones.

Idle compute instances are common in testing environments and have extremely low usage metrics. Imagine that one of your departments spends almost half of its monthly resources during the first week. Well, correctly configured alerts can help you take corrective actions immediately instead of waiting for the provider’s bill. Tagging means attributing resources with metadata that will appear next to each line item in the provider’s bill. Organizations can customize their tags and apply them to instances and resources on different projects or subscriptions.

You can enable billing alerts when your expenditure is approaching your prefined budget so that you can make the necessary adjustments to optimize your bills. Another factor that drives up cloud bills is overprovisioning of resources such that you end up with idle resources. Take a scenario where you are deploying a virtual server for hosting an application that only requires 4 GB of RAM and 2 vCPUs.

Cloud Cost Optimization: 13 Strategies To Reduce Cloud Bills

However straightforward setting up the website appears, you will be consuming four AWS services. Pricing models from major Cloud providers such as AWS and Microsoft Azure are not as straightforward as compared to on-premise costs. You simply won’t get a clear mapping of exactly what you will pay for the infrastructure.

• Organizations can customize their tags and apply them to instances and resources on different projects or subscriptions.
• Now, let’s discuss what strategies are the most effective for cost optimization in cloud computing.
• How well these activities are performed will determine how well the business can control cloud costs.
• Cloud consumption bills are quite challenging to understand and make it difficult to build “budget vs. forecast vs. actual usage” comparisons.
• This is essential during the planning phase, but also after the transformation when operating a hybrid IT or multi-cloud landscape.
• You can’t manage what you can’t measure, which often results in uncontrolled consumption.

For example, an entire organization can use only one network connection for accessing cloud services or train from a single e-learning app. However, you should design your architecture based on the expected usage to minimize spendings. Firms need to evolve their in-house financial management capabilities towards a more holistic cloud oriented model. Txture allows to compare cost forecasts for a variety of cloud providers and service models. Monitoring and controlling cloud spend can be overwhelming, considering hundreds of metrics. However, you can free up your team’s time by introducing automation tools that will notify you about the deviations from expected performance .

But effective cloud cost management won’t frustrate your employees or force them to use unapproved tools. Consequently, cost optimization can reduce the risks of data breaches. With these foundational pieces in place, cloud cost management can become a core cloud capability that delivers tangible value to the business.

Cloud Computing

Only those that are all in for the journey ahead will achieve the highest ratios of value-to-spend. In this CCoE Feature blog post series, we take a closer look at seven CCoE core tasks and show you how our Cloud Transformation Platform helps you to execute them. Years ago, being a web developer passionate about the latest technologies, I set up a company for developing non-standard web solutions. Over the last two decades in the IT industry, I have overseen its unstoppable growth and learned some personal insights, which I am happy to share with you. Companies need to account for developers who work outside of business hours. In that case, you can allow them to turn in these workloads manually and set limitations for how long they can work on them.

Effective cloud cost reduction is much more than merely disposing of unused resources to control prices. Instead, companies should find the balance between expenses and performance to reduce cloud bills without sacrificing productivity. To achieve that, you need to introduce appropriate practices, apply iterative monitoring, and ensure tight collaboration between stakeholders.

This article will tell you how to adapt the right cost management framework for private, public, and hybrid cloud services. Read until the end to discover 13 strategies that can help you use your resources more efficiently. More than that, you will find real-life examples of how we helped our clients reduce their cloud costs thanks to Acropolium’s 12-year experience working with cloud technologies. Most public cloud services offer native software for cost optimization and management. For instance, AWS and Microsoft Azure have tools that gather valuable cost metrics. However, native tools often lack functionality and have limited usefulness outside their cloud platforms.

For the Cloud Cost Forecast Txture automatically takes into account cloud product instance sizes and configurations based on your current IT infrastructure data and consumption. To make cost forecasts even more precise, parameters like runtime, storage or backup settings can be adjusted for right-sizing your target architecture. Choosing an efficient way for cloud governance to manage and cost optimize heterogeneous cloud environments is an important task to streamline your cloud project. This is essential during the planning phase, but also after the transformation when operating a hybrid IT or multi-cloud landscape.

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Simply put, you know exactly what you are going to spend on your infrastructure. Report showing on premise vs cloud costs and cloud cost savings per application per month – not all applications implicate financial benefits in a cloud deployment. Development and test workloads typically remain idle only for specific hours or days. You can develop a scheduling policy and power them down to optimize cloud costs. According to the 2020 Gartner Research, companies who schedule these instances can save up to 70% of their cloud costs.

Tales Of Transformation

Technology teams must work out the most cost-effective architecture for the business, making sure workloads run as efficiently in the cloud as possible. The IT finance team must get used to the utility cost model of cloud computing, including elasticity and usage-based billing. Business, for its part, must be able to budget for projects based on projected usage and defined policies. Budgeting for cloud services is usually not well thought out, the end result of which is raking up enormous cloud bills that can threaten to bulldoze the company out of business. Without a clear understanding of the various Cloud service plans & costs, your budget can easily spiral out of control.

The Lambda functions then process the application logic and save the data to a managed database service such as RDS or DynamoDB (non-relational database). Cloud vendors invest billions of dollars in setting up massive data centers across various regions, and they do not intend to give that away cheaply. Although the Cloud provides a pay-as-you-go model whereby you only pay for what you use, keep in mind that the goal of the Cloud vendor is always to maximize its revenue from the services offered. We developed a migration tool with backup measures and industry-leading data transfer speeds. On top of that, we reduced 46% of IT costs by implementing SSO authorization.

To keep pace with the utility spending pay-per-use cloud model, infrastructure financial planning needs to shift from CapEx-based to OpEx-based. This will have far reaching consequences for industries like Utilities or other capital intensive industries that favor CapEx. Traditional financial management competencies must evolve to accommodate the nuances of the cloud paradigm. In Txture, on-prem costs can be calculated based on OPEX and CAPEX application infrastructure costs. The cost of the technical and virtualized infrastructure can be weighted and aggregated on an application or even business capability or business unit level. Finally, Txture compares on-prem with expected cloud costs and estimates the business case of migrating an application or a portfolio of applications.

Rightsizing involves the ongoing control of the entire cloud infrastructure. In addition to cloud cost reduction, it can improve the general performance of your apps. Now, let’s discuss what strategies are the most effective for cost optimization in cloud computing. How often an organization optimizes cloud depends on the speed of its cloud adoption, how quickly it develops and the alignment with its financial cycle. Given the dynamism around what is available and what is being used, cloud optimization must be a continuous process and part of an organization’s operating model.

Companies can address gaps in functionality by augmenting the default analytics software with third-party cloud cost optimization tools. So, how can Cloud Cost Management businesses achieve these advantages with cloud cost reduction? The cloud has several unique characteristics that influence finance management.

In the allocation-based model, providers charge for the provided services regardless of usage. Alternatively, providers can follow the consumption-based model to bill companies based on the resources they’ve utilized. Some organizations have tried to implement cost management solutions from Densify, Apptio’s Cloudability, Cloud Health, Flexera, AWS or Azure. However, they are only point solutions and fail to align the business objective, plans, P&L and processes. Sadly, for some organizations, development teams embark on a project without paying attention to the pricing models for various services and which will enable them to budget accordingly. The pressing need is usually to deploy applications by the set deadline and to go live.