Today’s hybrid cloud and multicloud environments reflect the overarching reality that cloud usage – including all manner of software delivered as a service – is ubiquitous, so much so that it’s virtually invisible to most users.
That’s a good thing in terms of technology access and progress, but it comes with a potential downside: If you’re not paying attention, you might be in for some budget surprises.
“The cloud has allowed organizations quick, almost unfettered access to a multitude of tools and capabilities,” says Manish Srivastava, VP and GM of IT asset management at ServiceNow. “This access can and will lead to waste during operations inside the cloud.”
The flexible, scalable, and diverse nature of hybrid cloud adds urgency to the need to keep a close eye on spending. We recently covered some common – and potentially expensive –misconceptions about hybrid cloud costs. Now let’s take a look at some expert tips for reducing and optimizing your cloud spending.
The first step: Don’t wait for a bloated bill to take action. Sure, surprise bills can happen to the best of them. They shouldn’t be the only thing that motivates you to analyze and optimize spending, however. This is as true now as ever, Srivastava says.
“Cost reduction must be a top priority and treated as a standard process, especially during COVID, when IT budgets are facing increased scrutiny,” Srivastava says. “It is important to monitor shifting usage patterns for various cloud applications as employees work from home and at some point in the future start coming back into offices. Companies can get started by rightsizing budgets, pre-buying compute, developing spending agreements, and terminating unused and unidentified spend.”
Gordon Haff, technology evangelist at Red Hat, points out that you need to have enforceable strategies in place to make sure departments and individual users don’t leave the lights on, so to speak. He points to chargebacks, whereby IT bills cloud spending back to teams or departments based on their usage, as one tactic for doing so. A developer might be less likely to accidentally leave a public cloud instance perpetually up and running if they know it’s coming out of their team’s budget, for example.
“Establish default policies and shut down services that aren’t being actively used,” Haff advises.
A thorough understanding of what you’re actually spending is fundamental to proactively managing hybrid cloud costs. The explanation for many unexpected costs begins with something along these lines: “We didn’t know about [X].”
“First, an organization needs to identify cloud spend,” Srivastava says. “This process fluctuates organization to organization, but it usually involves analyzing business, security, and technical information (owner, cost center, application, project, environment). The more dimensions available in the analysis, the better breakdowns and tracking an organization will have across cloud spend.”
Optimization grows out of that type of analysis, and again needs to be a codified part of your hybrid cloud strategy.
“Cost optimization needs to be viewed as a governance component and a form of standard operating procedures,” Srivastava says. “The faster businesses can understand their entire cloud landscape, clarify policies, and enact accountability, the better they will be at managing the wide variety of cloud spend sprawling throughout their business, particularly in this current work-from-home environment.”
If your cloud service provider(s) offers tools for keeping tabs on what you’re spending, use them. It’s part of staying proactive, and some tools help automate certain types of responses to signals that your spending is moving out of its expected range.
“Use billing alert features,” Haff says.
