introductions

Cloud cost management is a hot topic today. Enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services around the world is a $100 billion industry. With so many platforms and approaches available, choosing the best solution for IT, finance, and C-Suite is a huge hurdle not to be taken lightly.
‍

‍

The importance of managing cloud costs

One reason for the demand for cloud management is unexpected cloud spending overruns and suspicions by CIOs and others that the use of unoptimized resources and unautomated processes affects profitability. Those who have succeeded in the cloud know that cloud computing is an invaluable investment for businesses. However, managing these tools, monitoring the right metrics, and optimizing spending across multiple clouds and accounts are essential to creating efficiency and enabling employees to budget and maintain costs responsibly.

In this blog, I'll show you common reasons why companies overspend, how CIOs or IT leaders can strategically build technology stacks, and some ways to reduce cloud costs.
‍

‍

Why cloud cost management is important

Cloud cost management includes approaches and plans for maintaining and regulating cloud usage costs between vendors. The goal is to be cost effective and reduce overall cloud spending where possible, but there are subtle differences in this approach. For example, you can't aggressively remove tools from the technology stack without going through due diligence on each tool. There may be one app you've never heard of, but it may turn out to be essential for a very specific team in your organization. The visibility and organization of cloud resources is important, and spending, coverage, and utilization are common in cost management when cloud management provides this structure and Gbps or CPU/time are familiar performance-oriented cloud metrics. ‍
‍

‍

Factors affecting cloud costs

Factors affecting cloud costs can include everything from network traffic, unused resources, and lack of visibility into spending across multiple cloud providers and accounts. So how can you minimize the possibility of overconsumption of cloud infrastructure? ‍
‍

‍

Common pitfalls to avoid

1. Lack of monitoring of cloud computing resources between vendors‍

Effective monitoring of a business's cloud resources is essential. To avoid under-or over-provisioning resources, all cloud providers, especially the most expensive providers, must track an organization's usage data for the tools employees use. Ideally, this becomes a regular part of the workflow, and there's a single easily accessible dashboard to monitor total cloud spend.

2. Lack of tagging and cost allocation

Without proper tagging of resources and allocating costs to the right teams and projects, it becomes very difficult to understand where spending is going and hold business units accountable. Implementing a consistent tagging strategy is critical for effective cloud cost management.

3. Executives and CloudOps teams lacking multi-cloud skills

Individual cloud providers provide native cost management tools, but using them effectively often requires deep platform expertise. CIOs and even experienced CloudOps professionals often lack the specific skills needed to optimize costs using each cloud's native tooling, and even less able to manage overall spending across multiple clouds.

4. Misaligned approaches to cloud cost optimization across teams

Effective cloud cost optimization can only be achieved when all teams are focused on the same goals. IT and finance teams shouldn't be involved alone. Each team has different priorities when using cloud services, but every team should be aware of the business's interests in the cloud financial management strategy. Implementing role-based access control helps ensure that the right people have visibility and control over cloud resources. ‍
‍

‍

Optimizing cloud spend: 5 best practices

1. Get visibility into your total cloud spend‍

Implement solutions like OpsNow that provide a single window view of cloud spend across all vendors and accounts. This allows you to view total cloud costs, identify the biggest savings opportunities, and track progress over time.

2. Implement consistent tags

Develop tagging strategies and taxonomies that can be applied consistently across all cloud resources regardless of provider. This allows you to accurately allocate costs, understand usage patterns, and identify underutilized resources. OpsNow makes it easy to apply and enforce tagging policies and ensure tag compliance and completeness.

3. Simplify multi-cloud management with OpsNow

OpsNow provides an intuitive platform for managing costs and resources across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and more. Through fast onboarding, pre-built dashboards and reports, and AI-based recommendations, OpsNow helps IT leaders optimize multi-cloud spending without deep expertise in each platform's basic tools.

4. Enable role-based access and budgeting

OpsNow can be used to provide controlled access to cloud cost and usage data based on each user's role and needs. This allows engineers and project owners to maintain centralized control while monitoring relevant metrics and managing their own spending. You can also set a budget and be automatically notified when a threshold is exceeded.

5. Continuously monitor and optimize‍

Cloud cost management is an ongoing process rather than a one-time exercise. Use automation to continuously monitor spending, identify anomalies, and optimize resource utilization. OpsNow provides intelligent AI-based recommendations to help you make smart decisions about capacity reservations, instance reserve, and take advantage of discounts. ‍
‍

‍

Benefits of a platform approach

As organizations increasingly adopt multi-cloud strategies, managing overall costs is becoming exponentially more complex. Relying on different basic tools is inefficient, leaves too much room for error, and importantly, lacks a single total cost calculation. Forward-looking CIOs are adopting platforms like OpsNow to gain integrated visibility, strengthen accountability through tagging and budgeting, and continue to optimize spending without requiring deep expertise on each cloud. ‍

‍

corollary

By following best practices and utilizing the right tools, you can tame multi-cloud complexity and control cloud costs. The pitfalls and best practices I've listed are common, and CIOs should compare deployment to self-deployment. Following the FinOps methodology is another reference, but tools like OpsNow provide the structure and integration needed to accept and rapidly operationalize the same concepts and methodologies.

This not only increases capital for innovation and growth, but also enables non-cloud teams to easily access multiple cloud data and communicate at a common level through DevOps.

‍