With more and more enterprises adopting the public cloud, it’s not uncommon for an organization to experience a bit of sticker shock when it comes to how much they’re spending on the cloud.
This can happen due to a variety of reasons, including the number of projects your organization has in the pipeline, as well as the pricing model cloud providers use—a model that benefits both parties but can easily make it possible for an organization to lose track of the amount they are spending.
The good news is there are a number of practices and tools—many of which are provided by the cloud platforms themselves—that you can use to ensure the amount you invest in the cloud doesn’t overshadow the amount of cloud real estate you actually need.
Below are four steps you can take to successfully manage and govern your cloud spend so you won’t blow up your budget.
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Step 1: Analyze your spend |
While any cloud cost governance measures you put in place need to be followed by every part of your organization, these three segments are especially important to keep your cloud spend under control: business decision makers, developers, and finance.
Here’s why:
Unless these three critical branches of your organization are aligned in why and how you are using the cloud, keeping costs in line will continue to be a challenge.
To find efficiencies in your workloads and cloud spending, you need to ensure your environments are right-sized. This means:
While these optimizations can be handled internally, more often than not organizations seek out a partner for this step due to lack of time or on-hand expertise.
Partners can also help you find provider discounts and identify powerful tools, like Azure Cost Management, that are focused on keeping cloud spends manageable and visible.
Simply finding efficiencies is not enough to keep your cloud costs in line. You need to continually monitor your organization’s usage and resources. You also need to keep a watchful eye out for potential anomalies.
Sticking with Azure, here are some of the tools you can use for ongoing monitoring of your cloud usage:
Beyond these available tools, any reputable cloud cost governance partner will also help you implement governance policies that oversee budgets, cost allocations, and chargebacks as well as resource automation to help you reduce your VM usage during off-peak times.
Whether your organization is new to the cloud or you are already using a public cloud platform, following best practices for cloud governance has very real benefits for your bottom line. In fact, companies that work with us to reign in their cloud spend save an average of 40-60%.
Dive deeper into how to address the challenges and unlock the benefits of taking your enterprise to the cloud. Click here to read our full, in-depth guide on adopting and migrating to the cloud.