Cloud Cost Management

What is Cloud Cost Management?

Cloud cost management refers to the concept of effectively managing your cloud expenses. Understanding the cloud's costs and eliminating any form of unnecessary expenses is a part of cloud cost management practices. It helps us determine the most economical strategies to optimize our utilization at the lowest expense. It entails controlling costs for things like memory, storage, network traffic, machine/server instances, and more. There are no shortcuts to reduce cloud costs instantly. Understanding how the services are configured and removing any bottlenecks will help us understand the factors affecting our overall cost. The organization must also develop sound strategies to guarantee that its workforce has clear fundamentals and understands cloud cost management's significance. In this article, we'll talk about cloud cost management, examine why so many people struggle with it, and see how you can effectively save your cloud management costs.

Why Do We Need Cloud Cost Management?

Investments in cloud services are guaranteed to pay off almost immediately and benefit the company in the long run with a sound cloud cost management approach. Effective cloud cost management can assist you with the following:

Avert Billing Surprises

Cloud cost management improves insight into the use of cloud services, ensuring you're one step ahead of any unauthorized expenditures that could sneak their way into subsequent invoices.

Making Wise Financial Choices

The cost to value based on cloud usage and pricing is displayed by cloud cost management. Making the proper decisions regarding best practices for future cloud utilization is aided by it.

Reduce Unnecessary Features

The absolute minimal cloud services you require to complete tasks affordably, quickly, and with the least amount of hassle are identified via cloud optimization.

Increasing IT Productivity

IT professionals may concentrate on their primary responsibilities and ensure that workloads function successfully in the cloud by effectively managing cloud costs.

Cloud Cost Management Strategies

There are several methods that companies can employ to control cloud expenditures. A few of these are:

• Right-sizing: Ascertain that the public cloud instances you select are the appropriate size for your company's requirements. Instead of always planning for optimal utilization, automatic scaling enables businesses to scale up resources when necessary and scale them down the rest of the time (which can be needlessly expensive).
• Power management: Not every instance must be used constantly. It is more cost-effective to schedule non-essential instances to shut down overnight or on weekends than to leave them operating continuously.
• Getting rid of instances that aren't being used: There's no reason to retain instances that aren't being used around (or pay for it). Since unused resources can lead to vulnerabilities, removing unwanted instances is also crucial for security.
• Discount instances: Discount instances do not guarantee availability, they are not suitable for business-critical workloads that must run continuously, but they can produce in significant cost savings when used sparingly.
• Organizational tactics: Budgeting for cloud usage and establishing usage guidelines are significant aspects of cloud cost management in addition to the IT strategies mentioned above.

Different Cloud Cost Models

Cloud cost models are dynamic in nature, given the erratic nature of supply and demand. These are auction-based, time-based, or cost-based, depending on various factors. There are three types of cloud pricing strategies: value-based, fact-based, and market-based. Value-based costs are driven by demand, cost-based costs are driven by supply, and an equilibrium of supply and demand drives the market-based cloud model. Moving from pure cost-based to cloud cost modeling that incorporates both value and cost is one of the major issues. Moving from stateful to stateless pricing, from mutable to immutable pricing, and creating cloud cost models that entice cloud users are further issues. The different types of cloud service cost models are as follows:

Service-Based Cost Model

The service-based cost model promotes value delivery with pricing that is focused on actual products. Banks, airlines, travel agencies, law firms, insurance companies, hospitals, and other industries all employ service-based cost structures. The level, tier, per device, user, and priority units are used to quantify the value of the service-based paradigm. This model's worth can be determined and forecasted.

Expenditure-Based Cost Model

The application for a central component is used as the unit of charge for determining the cost. Cost-plus, target return, and percentage cost models are the three different types of cost models available.

Customer Value-Based Cost Model

It establishes pricing based on the client's value delivery from a client's subjective point of view. Perceived value, feature, psychological, and hedonic-based models are the four types of value-based cost models. These models' development is informed by perception, sociology, psychology, and economics (utility). The customer value-based cost model outperforms the competition and maximizes the company's profit.

Performance-Based Cost Model

In the Performance-Based Cost Model, the seller is compensated depending on a cloud model's or service's actual performance. It is linked to the client's business result, which depends on particular performance measures. Telecom services like mobile apps, multi-party video conferences, and satellite connectivity are a few examples of how this approach is applied.

Retail-Based Cost Model

It is based on a small percentage of consumers who shop at physical stores or other retail establishments. The B2C (Business-to-Consumer) business model is affected. Discounts and allowances, product mixing, promotions, and discriminatory pricing are its four subdivisions.

Free Upfront and Pay Later Cost Model

Along with the growth in demand for cloud services, so is the level of competition among suppliers. Numerous cloud service companies use free-upfront-and-pay-later pricing structures to promote their products' fundamental capabilities, attracting more users and generating revenue from premium clients. There are three different cost structures: the free product cost on advertising, the freemium, and the razor and blades cost structure.

Utility-Based Cost Model

Utility models are metered price models where your service use is monitored, and you pay as necessary. Customers demand modern cloud models and reject outdated hardware-based pricing. Following the utility-based SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS models, they require contract renewal. To draw customers, several discount options and periodic price reductions are incorporated into cloud pricing structures.

Benefits of Cloud Cost Management

The following are the advantages of Cloud Cost Management:

• Without thorough visibility into your company's consumption and cloud architecture, engaging in effective cloud cost management is hard. Fortunately, this insight also helps with governance and security, in addition to many other business objectives like cloud cost control.
• Correct-sizing, or making sure that the public cloud instances you select are the right fit for your organization's needs, is a crucial cloud cost management strategy. Underprovisioning can result in poor performance; overprovisioning means spending too much, but with good preparation, firms can ensure smooth operations without raising costs.
• It helps in utilizing the resources effectively. Businesses may reduce waste and get the most out of the resources they do pay for by closely monitoring their spending. Two such strategies are automated scaling and load balancing.
• A company that accurately projects its cloud computing requirements won't be shocked by a sudden cost jump.
• The most evident advantage of cloud cost management is decreased costs. Businesses that are proactive in planning cloud costs might avoid overspending on underutilized resources and take advantage of bulk or advance payment reductions.

Common Challenges to Controlling Cloud Costs

Cloud cost optimization can be quite hard when it actually comes to implementing the strategy. As resources accumulate in your corporate account, the chore of maintaining your company's cloud can appear overwhelming. Not every company will have the time or resources to review its monthly cloud invoices and continuously optimize the cost of its cloud infrastructure. Let's examine some of the difficulties involved in cloud cost optimization and how cloud cost optimization tools can assist you in cutting cloud costs to understand better how to prevent overpaying on the cloud. Cloud users face the following common challenges in controlling their cloud costs.

Erroneous/Deceptive Budget Projecting Cloud Prices

It is important to have a dashboard that gathers all your options for cloud cost optimization in one place. If such a dashboard is not present, the cloud user might just be left with the native cloud platforms to get crucial data that might not be suitable for their business needs. Features like autoscaling enable you to automatically scale some cloud services, such as virtual machines, according to the characteristics supplied, such as traffic and usage levels. But even with these features, predicting cloud prices is not always straightforward. Additionally, it's crucial to consider any new cloud services and apps that can change the monthly cost. Use a cloud cost optimization solution with advanced forecasting capabilities to estimate your future cloud costs rather than investing more time and resources in setting up new procedures and workflows to gather the necessary data for forecasting.

Complexity of Billing and Cloud Cost Breakdowns

Due to the complexity and abundance of technical jargon, monthly cloud bills might occasionally be challenging for your finance staff to comprehend. It becomes more challenging when using multiple cloud providers or when establishing a hybrid cloud architecture, and it becomes even more challenging when you have to disclose cloud expenses and use them in various ways. Because of this, the road to cloud cost optimization is far more confusing and prone to error. Furthermore, the majority of cloud service providers have the flexibility to change their billing procedures at any time. This implies that your cloud invoices can vary significantly from month to month, necessitating the review of a brand-new batch of cloud bills. Tools for cloud cost optimization can guide users through the bill's elements that increase prices, ultimately assisting in eliminating cloud waste. These tools enable you to identify cloud wastes and make adjustments to minimize your cloud spending by breaking down your variable monthly cloud bills.

Limited Options Available for Cloud Cost Optimization

Today we commonly use tools such as automation and autoscaling to decide the best container size for our applications depending on the usage. Although they can significantly reduce cloud expenses, cloud cost optimization can go many steps beyond this. Cloud cost optimization solutions can spot anomalies and track them over time to notify your staff of unusual spending. An easy-to-use dashboard that emphasizes your cloud cost drivers can be used to do this. Additionally, there are dashboards that provide customized action plans for cloud cost minimization.

Different Teams have Non-Aligning Cloud-savings Strategies

Managing cloud resources and costs should not be handled differently by each team or department inside your firm. While DevOps and engineering teams typically take the lead in developing new services for an organisation, they occasionally overlook cloud cost optimization since they depend on that cost flexibility to provide their best work. Not every company has a dedicated team in charge of cloud strategy to supervise operations. To effectively manage cloud costs, it makes sense for managers of finance, business, and IT to collaborate and have policies that are in line with one another. After all, budget approval is based solely on cloud-based predictions of consumer spending.

Inability to Track Cloud Spending

Cloud sprawl is a frequent issue that many businesses encounter. Cloud sprawl refers to the unchecked proliferation of cloud instances, cloud services, or even cloud providers when a company neglects to properly monitor and manage its cloud computing resources. How can you reliably manage your cloud costs without the right tools? Making decisions about costs becomes challenging when billing data or cloud spend data over time cannot be viewed accurately. Direct financial consequences result from this lack of visibility into your cloud computing resources. One must have a suitable dashboard to begin with, otherwise you run the danger of having visibility issues that result in cloud cost leakage. Consider investing in a cloud cost optimization solution with an easy-to-use dashboard to optimize, monitor correctly, and control your cloud resources and expenditures.

Why Are So Many Companies Failing at Cloud Cost Management?

The following are some reasons why cloud cost management is difficult for most businesses.

Poor Visibility

A significant flaw of decentralization is the poor visibility of resource consumption. IT specialists maintained a tight grip on the visibility of sensitive data before the advent of clouds. They have a challenging time regaining control because of cloud technologies. It has exposed the organization's data to dangers from both inside and outside threats. If things weren't already bad enough, people who store their data in the public cloud are constantly concerned about its security. They lack the visibility necessary to comprehend how sensitive data is handled and kept. Given how exposed the public cloud is, improved visibility is essential to guarantee that the data is secure and accessible. The organization's effective cloud cost management will always be a pipe dream if it fails to build a solid IT staff that lacks direction.

Ineffective Cost Optimization

Every year, a significant portion of the money spent on cloud resources gets wasted due to ineffective cost optimization. This rate is troubling for a variety of reasons. However, it appears that most businesses are failing to optimize cloud costs. Some overprovision, others choose the incorrect instance size, and others neglect to turn off their virtual machines when not in use, resulting in excessive spending. In most of these instances, the outcome is the same. Despite their best efforts, the businesses have been unable to minimize their spending. Most businesses also state that their cloud computing expenses are more than anticipated and are unsure why.

Unwillingness to Adapt

IT personnel need to adapt quickly and pick up new skills in light of the changes in technology. Companies will need to devote time and resources to educating them and getting them familiar with the latest tools. If an IT expert is unwilling to comprehend the complexities of the cloud, he will never be able to acquire, implement, and manage it successfully. Businesses must ensure that their IT staff members comprehend the significance of cloud cost management. The proper and timely distribution of resources will help clear up a lot of the extraneous mess currently surrounding cloud computing.

Internal Misunderstandings Driving Up Prices

Secure communication and good employee listening skills are necessary for the organization's success. Making preparations in your boardroom alone won't advance the cause. Companies must take proactive measures to ensure no communication gaps between parties. A good cloud strategy cannot exist without a channel of communication and open discussion. An organization must always emphasize the value of communication while choosing the finest cloud cost management solutions. No matter how worthwhile the efforts were, internal miscommunication might render them ineffective. IT personnel must have enough discretion to choose the best course of action for successful cloud implementation. To monitor and implement the required modifications, the communication flow must continue even after the application has been completed and dusted.

Cloud Cost Management Best Practices

The process of cloud optimization is one of constant progress. It largely relies on cloud cost management technologies that track cloud KPIs like utilization, cost, and performance, as well as FinOps, a cross-functional team made up of IT, finance, and engineering with the aim of improving an organization's capacity to understand and minimize cloud expenses. A successful cloud optimization approach depends on your ability to comprehend what is occurring in your cloud environment. Some of the top methods for controlling your cloud environment are listed below:

Improve Your Infrastructure Constantly

With automated insights and forecasting powered by AI, companies can automate their cloud optimization plan. With real-time recommendations that are customized to your environment and easy to deploy, advanced cloud cost optimization tools assist you in continuously optimizing your cloud spending. Additionally, they can gather data from every cloud-based measure, even in situations with several clouds, learn each one's typical behavior on their own, and produce cost estimates that facilitate better resource and budget planning.

Track Your Cloud Expenses in Real-time

Both cloud cost management and optimization depend on effective cloud cost monitoring. It can be challenging to spot anomalies in real-time while monitoring cloud spending, which is considerably different from monitoring other organizational costs. Unreal-time monitoring of cloud activity can lead to possibly avoidable runaway costs. Furthermore, cloud teams must comprehend the business context of their cloud performance and usage. An AI-based monitoring solution can instantly warn the appropriate teams when usage and cost patterns deviate from expectations.

Achieve a Unified Perspective with Granular Billing Visualization

Gaining control over cloud costs requires diving in and seeing the overall picture of the cloud. Cloud teams must rely on visualization and reporting tools for complete, end-to-end visibility over the entire multi-cloud infrastructure and associated billing charges from a single platform. These technologies allow teams to track spend and usage across projects, understand the cost of each resource, service, project, or team, generate unique dashboards and reports for each customer or project, and dig down to the resource level. Visualizing your cloud costs and consumption data is essential for effective cloud financial management.