As you increase your cloud presence, how are you ensuring a process to manage and optimize cloud costs? Gartner estimates that roughly 80% of organizations overshot their infrastructure as a service (IaaS) budgets in 2020. This likely stemmed from mismanaged cloud spending, weak cloud governance, and a lack of cost optimization. As organizations look to the cloud for the cost savings, it’s vital to ensure that your organization has a process in place to manage costs effectively.
As many IT infrastructure and operations teams still follow procedures based on outdated, on-premises data center principles rather than modern cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) models, teams often lack the organizational processes needed to manage costs in the cloud. To make things worse, a lack of alignment between IT teams and finance departments can also lead to reckless spending behavior.
As the landscape of cloud infrastructure evolves, it’s important to realize that cloud management and cost optimization is a process and not a one-time fix. Proper cloud management is like hygiene and requires routine procedure and ongoing refinement. Although cloud service expense management (CSEM) services aim to offer a solution to this issue, cookie cutter solutions are rarely your best option. Software may provide a great high level overview of cost breakdowns but lack personalized recommendations based upon a company’s unique business objectives. Native tools within your provider cloud console may also provide valuable insights into performance but these analytics likely lack depth, context, or highly personalized improvement recommendations that an expert may offer. At Adelear, we provide client-specific solutions to our clients that help organizations meet their goals, become more efficient and enable data-driven decision making around cost optimization.
Recommendations
In order to thoroughly assess your cloud activity, separate your organization’s products and applications according to business unit or use case. At Adelear, during our initial assessment, we’ll start by categorizing your cloud activity based on service cost breakdown, service utilization percentage, and service performance. This will allow for a greater transparency into cloud costs and resource consumption.
Tagging or Labeling
Tagging (in AWS and Azure) or Labeling (GCP) allows you to attach a user-defined key/name and value metadata to resources, providing greater visibility into resource ownership, environment, and purpose. Creating tags can help you manage, identify, organize, search for, and filter resources.
Role-Based Access Control
Support for roles on users and groups, controlling access and privileges.
Discount Optimization
Ability to display the savings generated by service discounts and trial periods.
Budget Management:
Define budgets over various time periods and by cost allocation segment, user or group. Visualize current spend and project budget overruns.
Dashboard and Reporting
Visualize data on multiple interactive dashboards, create and customize dashboards or reports, and associate them with specific roles, applications, or entire departments.
Spending Thresholds:
By setting spending parameters and thresholds, teams can easily detect anomalous changes in consumption.
Cost Forecasting:
By using trends in historic data spendage, teams can model future spending expectations for a future project, deployment, or migration.
Cost Optimization:
Detect and downgrade underutilized resources within your environment, take advantage of discounts, and optimize performance.
Reserved Instances: Reserve instances are discounts applied for on demand instance use, allowing you to save up to 75% for on demand capacity. By setting up alert policies, you can easily manage reserve instances within your environment.
At Adelear, we believe in aligning an organization’s financial initiatives with their cloud initiatives. We do this through technical expertise along with pre-configured solutions designed with enterprise-level security, performance, and resiliency. Our process enables organizations to leverage the scale and flexibility of public cloud providers, while also enjoying lower costs. Our comprehensive solutions help solve your cloud migration and development challenges while meeting the unique constraints of your mission. Through continuous integration to development environments, we reduce the friction between implementation and testing. To learn more on our approach, contact us to set up a free strategy session/consultation at support@adelear.com.