Cloud computing may be the most exciting technological innovation of the 21st century. It has been adopted more quickly than other technologies in this field. Especially, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud have become the new norm for enterprises today. Cloud computing remains one of the fastest-growing segments of IT spending in every sector. For CIO’s it is a huge responsibility to allocate cloud budgets wisely, since higher the spending, greater is the impact if things go haywire.
According to Gartner, it is expected that by 2024, nearly all legacy applications that migrate to the cloud will require optimization to make them more cost-efficient.
To deep dive further, public cloud offers several benefits, including agility, flexibility, scalability, and ease of administration, however there is a risk of overspending. Many organizations often over allocate resources to a workload knowing or unknowingly. The customers will likely experience this when transitioning from on-premises cost (CapEx) models to cloud-based operational expenditure (OpEx) models. It would often apply to cloud-based applications furthermore.
Speaking of Cost Management, it continues to improve the native optimization capabilities of cloud solutions to enable organizations to choose the most cost-effective architecture that can deliver the required performance.
Cost Management and Optimization: Challenges, Strategy and Approach
The idea behind cloud cost management (also called cloud cost optimization) is to manage your cloud expenses efficiently. It involves understanding your cloud spends and reducing cloud waste. Cloud cost optimization is vital because you want to maximize the benefits of your cloud investment and achieve your business goals at the lowest possible cost. There are numerous expenses to manage, including compute, storage, network traffic, software licenses, web services and support.
Many businesses use the cloud as the primary means of reducing costs, so this is a major issue. In order to keep your cloud costs low and only pay for what your business needs, what's most important?
To further understand this, let’s begin with the challenges and organization faces during their cloud adoption journey.
Cloud Cost Management Challenges
There are many advantages of a cloud infrastructure for enterprises, but there are also challenges. The advantages of security, scalability, and control are straightforward. It is equally important to understand how cloud technology impacts your business - in this case, cloud cost is vital.
Despite the rush to cloud, organizations struggle to control cloud spending. It has become easier to deploy and use services in cloud vendor, but this self-service model also makes it very easy to overspend. Therefore, organizations are realizing they must optimize their cloud spend and eliminate waste.
Cloud cost management presents the following challenges:
- Making purchasing decisions
- Using right policies to avoid anomalies
- Cloud cost accountability and saving potential
- Cost transparency to all stakeholders
- Tools and dashboards to use for improving visibility and analysis
- Making a collaborative experience of capturing ideas, discussion and actionable
Cloud Cost Management Strategies
A systematic approach to cost management should be taken before investing in cloud services to mitigate challenges. As a result, organizations must create a vision, strategy, and plan to manage and optimize cloud costs, as well as put in place the right tools and processes to manage and optimize ongoing cloud spending.
Finance teams across the world are now sharpening their pencils in response to COVID-19 and looking more aggressively at such measures.
With a holistic view on the importance of cost management, FPT CloudSuite consider the following to best manage growing cloud cost:
- Invest in the right tools to succeed
- Accountability regarding costs
- Optimize spending by taking appropriate action
CloudSuite’s Approach in Addressing Cost Management Challenges
FPT CloudSuite’s FinOps service is a strategic and tactical services for Cloud Cost Management and Optimization. It can help organization to take back control of spiraling cloud spend and enforcing the reduction of cloud cost.
Using FPT CloudSuite’s FinOps service, applications may be run within the cloud at all-time low possible cost to produce the specified business outcomes. Cloud spending will be reduced by utilizing cloud resources effectively and taking advantage of the tools and guidance provided by FPT CloudSuite’s FinOps service.
Conclusion
Although Cloud vendor has proven to be a cost-effective IT solution, there are many ways that cloud cost can rise over time. Implementing the right tools and processes to manage your costs will allow you to avoid costly surprises in the future and help your business succeed.
As a way to overcome this challenge, FPT CloudSuite’s FinOps framework enables clients to gain visibility into costs as well as optimize their cloud expenses without compromising availability, performance and flexibility of your mission critical applications on cloud platform.