
Just as every coins has two sides, so too does the investment in cloud-based environments. Along with several benefits, they also create their own challenges, but the key one is managing the costs. While in on-prem infrastructure, the payment is one-ff, in the cloud, it is an ongoing expense based on consumption. This makes predicting the cost estimates accurately difficult and when the bill arrives, explaining the many line items becomes difficult. Without timely financial management and cost optimization, the cloud may prove to be a greater drain on resources, nullifying the benefits it had promised!
According to a Deloitte study, spending waste is emerging to be a major issue in the absence of controls and governance around consumption, accounting for nearly 30% of the total IT spend.
Some of the complexities in managing costs of public cloud, according to a Gartner report, include:
Efficient use of cloud engineering services can provide tangible financial benefits and requires collaboration across disciplines such as operations, product management, governance, architecture, finance and application development. To improve return on investment (ROI), linking cloud costs with business KPIs can improve spend management and optimize costs.
Begin with Cloud Migration Planning
To have better control on cloud spends and maximize value from cloud investments, Deloitte recommends building a strong business case across the portfolio by identifying factors that contribute to tech spending. The following are the obvious costs:
What is often overlooked, however, and significantly adds to the costs are:
Analyze the impact of spending on each of these cost factors and realign, redistribute, or reduce migration costs wherever possible without reducing performance.
While the earlier recommendation was for migration planning, what about optimizing costs for your ongoing cloud operations? Some of the factors that contribute to cloud-spending waste include:
Businesses can bring down their cloud costs by:
Automating optimization can help reduce inefficiencies through alerts and reports on wastes, providing greater visibility and transparency. Apart from implementing a plan to optimize cloud spending, it also requires governance for ongoing spend management with clearly defined spending guidelines, elucidate processes to maintain savings and automate the implementation of recommendations for optimization.
The governance process should focus on:
Since measuring KPIs provides insights into spends, governance efforts define the metrics for factors such as:
Indium Software, a two-decade old digital engineering solutions company, is an AWS Select Consulting partner that helps customers design, architect, build, migrate, and manage cloud solutions built on AWS. One of the key focus areas for the company is to optimize costs and maximize investments in AWS by assessing the needs of the company, provisioning appropriately to avoid redundancies, create governance models for closely monitoring resources and shutting down the unnecessary ones and automating implementation and tracking to provide visibility and transparency.
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We have experience including 150+ App Migration/Modernization, 20+ Petabytes Data Migration, 70+ Cloud-native App & SaaS development, and 250+ CI/CD pipelines. We provide deep technical and domain expertise building a digital extension of our clients’ core business and increase customer intimacy. Our AWS partnership with home-grown IPs on Text Analytics and Digital Assurance, makes us well suited to deliver continuous digital improvements and help customers realize the full potential of their business applications and data on AWS.
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