Four proven ways to control your cloud spend

Cloud computing is often hailed as a solution for reducing capital expenses and consolidating operational expenses into a predictable monthly fee. But while there’s no denying the benefits of scalability and cost control the cloud brings, many organizations spend more than they need to. This is often due to unnecessary complexity and the fact that many companies use far more apps, systems, and services than they should.
Here are some proven ways to regain control over your cloud spend:

1. Implement a suitable governance model

Businesses are investing more and more in cloud technologies every year, with 2019 seeing a record combined global spend of $107 billion. Investments in cloud technologies are outpacing the cost of financial governance over the cloud. The main reasons for this is that cloud usage is rising all the time, and business leaders lack proper oversight over what they’re spending and which resources they’re actually using.
Cloud cost governance solutions help business leaders proactively understand what their bills will be by monitoring usage in real time and aggregating reports. A suitable governance model also gives administrators the opportunity to place restrictions on the use of cloud resources to avoid overprovisioning and allocate budgets for each department. Proper governance is even more important now that many businesses have highly complex multi-cloud environments.

2. Avoid overprovisioning compute power

Cloud spend primarily revolves around the amount of compute power and storage space you allocate. This might include, for example, provisioning virtual machines and storage spaces. Public cloud instances are typically priced on an hourly basis, with rates based on the number of processor cores, the amount of RAM, and storage capacity and performance. It’s easy to get into a cycle of overprovisioning to ensure you always have the resources you need.
While underprovisioning can lead to serious disruption and end up being even more costly, it is important that you can easily scale your computing resources with demand. Idle instances should always be turned off, and you should establish a clear baseline to identify underutilized resources. This will also make your infrastructure easier to manage, and reducing the number of instances and endpoints also helps you reduce your cyberattack surface.

3. Analyze your network traffic closely

Cloud computing presents some unique visibility challenges, and there remains a widespread fear of losing control over management and expenses. Even if you’ve completely outsourced your computing infrastructure, including the network side itself, you still need a way to monitor performance and analyze network traffic. This will help you identify usage spikes or anomalies and resolve any issues proactively.
 When traditional data centers were still a thing, you’d typically invest in a certain capacity, and that meant usage costs would be fairly predictable until you reached the limit. The cloud offers the benefit of practically unlimited scalability, but that also means all unnecessary traffic gets added to your bill. Cloud telemetry helps you avoid misconfigurations that increase bandwidth unnecessarily and optimize usage costs across the board.

4. Determine your storage needs and costs

One of the biggest expenses of cloud computing are those associated with storage cost. With compute power, by contrast, you usually only pay for it when you’re actually using it. However, with storage, all those virtual machines, backup images, and other redundancies need to be available when employees need to access them. These are just some of the factors that are contributing to the massive proliferation of data.
Chances are, a lot of the data in your organization’s possession is of no value. It’s important to accurately determine how much of this data you can purge and have in place a system that automatically retires things like unused virtual machines and other unnecessary resources. If there isn’t a real business need for data duplication in multiple places, that might be another area where you can scale back your storage capacity and bandwidth requirements.
SimplyClouds provides powerful, affordable, and tailor-made cloud services for businesses. Our solutions help you maintain complete oversight of your cloud spend and keep control over your valuable technology assets. Contact us today to find out more.