Cloud cost management is a red hot topic today. Enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services around the world is a hundred billion dollar industry. With so many available platforms and approaches, choosing the best solution that works for IT, Finance, and the C-Suite is a major hurdle not to be taken lightly.
One reason for the demand for cloud management is the unexpected cloud spend overruns and the CIO's and others' suspicion of unoptimized resources and use of non-automated processes impacting profitability. Those of us who have had success in the cloud know cloud computing is an invaluable investment for businesses. However, managing these tools, monitoring the right metrics, and optimizing spend across multiple clouds and accounts is essential to creating efficiencies and enabling your employees to budget and maintain costs responsibly.
In this blog, I'll show you common ways in which businesses overspend, how to build a tech stack strategically as a CIO or IT leader, and a few ways to reduce your cloud bill.
Cloud cost management encompasses your approach and planning when it comes to maintaining and regulating the costs of your cloud usage across providers. The goal is to be cost-effective and reduce your overall cloud spend where possible, but there are nuances to that approach. For example, you can't just cut tools aggressively out of your tech stack without doing due diligence for each one—there may be one app you've never heard of, but it turns out to be crucial for one very specific team in your organization. The visibility and organization of your cloud resources is critical and cloud management provides this structure and where Gbps or CPU/hr are the familiar performance-oriented cloud metrics, spend, coverage and utilization are common in cost management.
Factors affecting cloud costs can include anything from network traffic, to unused resources, to lack of visibility into spend across multiple cloud providers and accounts. So, how can you minimize the chances of overspending on cloud infrastructure?
Monitoring your business' cloud resources effectively is a must. You don't want to under- or over-provision resources, so be sure to track your organization's usage data for tools your employees are using across all your cloud providers—especially the most expensive ones. Ideally, this will be a regular part of your workflows and there's a single dashboard you can easily access to monitor total cloud spend.
Without proper tagging of resources and allocation of costs to the right teams and projects, it becomes very difficult to understand where spend is going and hold business units accountable. Implementing a consistent tagging strategy is crucial for effective cloud cost management.
While individual cloud providers offer native cost management tools, these often require in-depth platform expertise to use effectively. CIOs and even experienced CloudOps professionals often lack the specific skills needed to optimize costs using each cloud's native tooling, let alone the ability to manage spend holistically across multiple clouds.
You can only have effective cloud cost optimization when all teams are aligned with the same goal—your IT and finance teams can't be the only ones involved. Different teams will have varying priorities when using cloud services, but every team has to be aware of their stake in your business's cloud financial management strategy. It helps to implement role-based access control so the right people have visibility and management capabilities for the cloud resources they are responsible for.
Implement a solution like OpsNow that provides a single pane of glass view into cloud spend across all providers and accounts. This enables you to see your total cloud costs, identify the biggest opportunities for savings, and track progress over time.
Develop a tagging strategy and taxonomy that can be applied consistently across all your cloud resources, regardless of provider. This allows you to allocate costs accurately, understand usage patterns, and identify underutilized resources. OpsNow makes it easy to apply and enforce tagging policies and ensure tag compliance and completeness..
OpsNow provides an intuitive platform for managing costs and resources across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and more. With fast onboarding, pre-built dashboards and reports, and AI-powered recommendations, OpsNow enables IT leaders to optimize multi-cloud spend without needing deep expertise in each platform's native tools.
With OpsNow, you can provide controlled access to cloud cost and usage data based on each user's role and needs. This allows engineers and project owners to monitor relevant metrics and manage their own spend, while maintaining centralized control. You can also set budgets and get alerted automatically when thresholds are exceeded.
Cloud cost management is an ongoing process, not a one-time exercise. Leverage automation to continually monitor spend, identify anomalies, and optimize resource utilization. OpsNow provides intelligent AI-derived recommendations to help you make wise decisions about reserving capacity, rightsizing instances, and taking advantage of discounts.
As organizations increasingly adopt multi-cloud strategies, managing costs holistically becomes exponentially more complex. Relying on disparate native tools is inefficient and leaves too much room for error – and importantly lack of a single total tally of costs. Forward-thinking CIOs are adopting platforms like OpsNow to get unified visibility, drive accountability through tagging and budgeting, and continuously optimize spend—without needing deep expertise in each cloud.
By following best practices and leveraging the right tools, you can tame multi-cloud complexity and keep your cloud costs under control. The pitfalls and best practices I listed are common - and CIO’s have to weigh building vs. homegrown. Following the FinOps methodology is another reference; but tools like OpsNow embrace the same concepts and methodologies and provide the structure and integration needed to quickly operationalize.
The result is not only more capital for innovation and growth; but the ability for non-cloud teams to easily access multi-cloud data and communicate on a common level with DevOps.
