After digital disruption, many enterprises are rapidly adopting Cloud computing, as it provides opportunities for them to act quickly and deliver services as per market requirements. Cloud computing helps in the diversification of workloads across the enterprise and could be operated from anywhere, regardless of location. Simply put, migrating to Cloud-based infrastructure helps businesses experience greater benefits like storage and scalability.

However, one of the key aspects that most organizations fail to tackle when it comes to Cloud computing is cost management. Managing Cloud costs remains challenging for businesses since Cloud assets are distributed across multiple Cloud vendors, departments, and non-containerized environments. Unmanageable Cloud costs also trigger several challenges for businesses that impact efficiency and performance.

Key Factors Causing Unmanageability of Cloud Costs

• Lack of Cloud Security Awareness - Businesses with a lack of Cloud security awareness might encounter problems related to security threats, network/application concerns, and an inability to function against service agreements. Accordingly, the efficiency of the business falls significantly and causes greater loss.
• Inappropriate Provisioning – In the context of Cloud computing, provisioning means the management of cloud resources. Inappropriate provision by businesses causes mishandling of resources resulting in over or underutilization of Cloud resources.
• Irregular Forecasting - Sometimes enterprises fail to forecast budget requirements and assess the instance size of Cloud resources, due to inadequate tools. This failure of forecasting results in ineffective decision-making.
• Lack of Authenticity - Improper authenticity in the Cloud infrastructure poses various security challenges such as intrusion and breach of data, leak of private information, and unauthorized data modifications.

To overcome these challenges, forecasting Cloud costs and keeping them under control, businesses should use the right Cloud cost management tools. Utilizing the right tool helps businesses save money, regulate Cloud provisioning, and maximize usage.

What is Cloud Cost Management?

In general, Cloud cost management is an organizational technique that allows businesses to analyze and manage the costs or requirements associated with their Cloud technology. By adopting this technique, businesses can efficiently manage and track Cloud resource utilization and effectively optimize their usage.

Steps to Achieve the Best Cloud Cost Management for Businesses

Assess Idle Resources

First, enterprises must assess and identify unused or idle resources. Using a temporary server for a single-use process and forgetting to disconnect from the storage associated with instances are some common use case irregularities that contribute to a rise in Cloud costs. Moreover, organizations running Cloud instances even when no longer needed become vulnerable to risks like Cloud sprawling. Therefore, identifying such resources and scaling them accordingly is a good starting point for organizations to achieve Cloud cost management.

To discover idle resources, businesses can use Cloud management tools that monitor metrics such as CPU load, network traffic, and other vital data points to find resources that are no longer in use. With robust automation and advanced analytics capabilities, the tools can monitor resources constantly and automatically shut down those when no longer required.

Execute Rightsizing

Overprovisioning remains a common problem for enterprises. It creates a lack of visibility for enterprises. Hence, businesses fail to monitor and regulate application scale to fulfill demands.

Instead, businesses can leverage Cloud monitoring and analytics tools to evaluate actual resource utilization of containers, instances, pods, and clusters. These tools can help the internal workforce understand what resources they need to run applications/workloads and forecast what resources will be required in the future, making it possible to enhance container packing efficiency. This makes it possible for businesses to resolutely size resources and creates adequate buffer capacity to fulfill workload requirements.

Perform Regular Audits

Executing regular Cloud resource and utilization audits can be very helpful in Cloud cost monitoring and optimization. The recognized Cloud optimization services provider can effectively perform periodical or half-yearly reviews and can provide invaluable insights to the company about its cloud utilization. Experts can also help enterprises to identify under-utilized resources to possibly reduce them and save IT and cloud costs.

Storage and Memory Management

Organizing Cloud storage is as significant as selecting the right storage category for Cloud instances. Performing regular usage monitoring can help enterprises keep their Cloud costs under control. Similarly, enterprises also need to abandon useless data to reduce costs while evading clutter in their structural data. There are numerous storage and memory management tools designed by Cloud platform vendors available in the market that can help businesses quickly identify orphaned snapshots, and handle Cloud storage and instances.

Modify Network Configurations

Cloud data transfer costs can differ extensively and escalate quickly with usage, based on how network traffic is configured. Therefore, optimizing network configuration can have a substantial impact on data transfer expenses. For instance, selecting private IP addresses instead of elastic or public IP addresses wherever possible can create a big change in data transfer costs.

Wrapping Up

Businesses operating Cloud without proper cost planning and insight can encounter major financial repercussions. Cloud cost optimization can be attained through the smart selection of Cloud features and optimizing Cloud performance along with the steps mentioned above. Organizations can experience many great capabilities from the Cloud, as long as they pay attention to Cloud cost optimization.