Cloud Cost Management – An Easy Guide In 5 Points

 Introduction

Cloud cost management is also known as cloud cost optimization and is the way the organization plans that allows it to understand as well as manage its costs and its needs that are associated with cloud technology. Cloud cost management, in simple terms, is a way to maximize the efficiency and the usage of the cloud.

1. Why cloud cost management?
2. Cloud cost management strategies
3. Advantages of cloud cost management
4. Purpose of cloud cost management
5. Cloud cost management best practices

1) Why cloud cost management? 

The cloud cost is constantly rising, and the decision-making has been decentralized, which makes expense tracking and visibility difficult. The major strength that the cloud offers is rapid scalability, but at the time, this can also backfire and increase costs.

Companies that make use of the multi-cloud combination need to practice the multi-cloud cost management system that takes into account several of the public cloud providers. If the business understands its cloud usage and costs, then it can improve the performance and efficiency of the cloud technology.

2) Cloud cost management strategies

There are various strategies that businesses can use for cloud cost management. Some of these are:

• Right-sizing ensures that the public cloud that you choose is the right fit for your company’s needs.
• Automatic scaling lets the organization scale the resources up as per need and then scale it down at other times so that they are not at the maximum utilization level at each time.
• Power scheduling takes care that all the instanced do not run through the day. The non-essential instances are shut down when not needed to save cost.
• Removing any unused instance that you are not using should be removed to cut the cost.
• Discount instances are great for occasional use but cannot be used for any critical business workload. Nevertheless, they save on cost.
• Along with the IT strategies, setting policies and having a budget around the usage of the cloud is important for effective cloud management.

3) Advantages of cloud cost management

Here are some of the benefits of cloud cost management.

• It decreases cost. Planning the cost of the cloud lets the business not overspend on any unused resource.
• A business that is capable of forecasting cloud computing needs can plan costs predictably, which does not lead to an increase in cost.
• When organizations look at spending closely, it helps to reduce wastage.

• Right-sizing is an important method of service management in cloud computing. These are the public cloud instances that are perfect for your organizational needs. This leads to better performance.
• Detailed visibility allows the company to practice good cloud cost management. Along with it, it also offers security and better governance.

4) Purpose of cloud cost management

Cloud cost management lets the business control their cloud services spending and also helps to maximize resources. The cloud providers will mostly offer basic tools for cloud cost management. Still, companies should look to use specialized solutions from third parties that offer more visibility and insights into the cost of using the cloud. When cloud cost management is made a priority, then it helps the business to control costs and offers good governance while at the same time ensuring that it has all the resources that it needs to be competitive.

Following the best practices of Cloud cost management helps to support the business objectives and the best cloud practices, which are visibility security, accountability, and organization. Cloud cost management is important for various reasons, and good cloud cost management in place lets the business make plans and reduce wastage.

5) Cloud cost management best practices

Here are some of the cloud cost management best practices.

• Visibility to the entire cloud inventory ensures better management of cloud resources.
• Cloud cost analytics lets you track not just what you have spent but also what you will be spending.
• Role-based access lets the user manage the cloud infrastructure actively that defines the accessibility and permission in the platform.
• Using the uncontrolled stack templates lets the administers deploy the process not just faster but aligned with the roles of the department.
• The notification and alerts are updated to let the organization stay ahead of any day to day environmental changes.
• Governance tools that are cloud-based let us track the cost and usage of the cloud and alert the administrators when the total usage exceeds a particular amount that helps to control cost
• Defining and allocating budgets to avoid cost overrun ensure that the costs of the cloud are aligned with its value.

Conclusion

With cloud infrastructure becoming more complex day by day, it is getting difficult to track cloud costs. The pay for what you use model is great, but at times, costs do start to spiral and go out of control. This especially happens in organizations where there is decentralization making no one accountable for the costs. It is thus vital that companies have a proper cloud cost management system in place to use the infrastructure optimally without paying heavily towards it.

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