HOW TO REDUCE YOUR COSTS ON CLOUD THROUGH PROACTIVE MONITORING?

We recommend some best practices to simplify budget tracking and spending analysis to reduce waste and lower overall costs in the cloud.

When cloud computing was first introduced as a technology, cost control or lower TCO was one of its biggest selling points. Over time, as cloud adoption has witnessed huge growth, some of cloud's hidden costs have also gone up. For example, with the ease in setting up server instances, many organizations are guilty of spinning up too many server instances that never get used. If these unused resources are not de-provisioned or removed, the cost of cloud computing related costs keeps on going up. In many cases, organizations are not able to decide the right cloud option for a specific workload. This leads to unexpected results that may lead to escalations in cost and performance outages.

Some of the benefits provided by a cloud visibility and monitoring tools for reducing costs include:

1. Improved visibility across different clouds

Whether an organization is running specific workloads on a public cloud, or virtual machines on the private cloud, by using a cloud visibility tool, organizations can analyze and monitor costs in a centralized location.

2. Periodic cloud assessment to optimize resource and performance

A periodic cloud assessment exercise can help organizations in maximizing their value of investments made in cloud.

3. Reduce wastage and maximize utilization

A cloud visibility tool helps organizations reduce wastage spent by analyzing granular usage data to compare actual performance with provisioned capacity and quickly identify assets that can be terminated for greater efficiency.

4. Building a culture of financial responsibility

Once cloud costs are aligned to different business units, they can be compared with actual business metrics.

As one can see, the cloud offers unlimited scalability. However, if left uncontrolled, the costs can be higher than expected or provisioned budgets. A cloud visibility tool can help in ensuring that cloud costs are optimized and are always under control.