Best Practices For Efficient Cost Tracking And Management In Cloud Environments

Cloud adoption is essential for businesses to stay relevant and competitive in a digital-first world. With cloud-based solutions, organizations can deliver high-quality applications faster. You can shift your IT infrastructure to the cloud to build scalable, flexible, and secure products. In the wake of the global push for cloud adoption, companies can choose a variety of approaches like private, public, and hybrid cloud strategies as per their business requirement.

Despite the tremendous benefits of cloud platforms, companies need help with one core aspect of cloud management – costs. Cloud is expensive. Gartner has reported that cloud spending will increase to 45% of overall IT spending by companies by 2026, from less than 17% in 2021. It is challenging for companies to implement cloud cost optimization, and it is a universal challenge. Optimizing cloud spending is the top priority for over 73% of the decision-makers, per the 2020 State of Cloud Report.

Below we discussed some tips and best practices that help you strategize your cloud cost optimization without affecting your business objectives.

Best Practices for Cloud Cost Optimization

Identify unused or idle resources

When building cloud applications, developers are assigned temporary resources for certain tasks. Ideally, these resources must be de-provisioned after their use. But sometimes developers forget to do so, which causes inefficient cloud utilization. In other cases, some instances are left unused. Cloud providers will charge you for resources in their entirety regardless of your CPU utilization. Therefore, you must conduct hygiene checks to identify resources that are either idle or attached to terminated instances.

Right-sizing is yet another cloud optimization strategy that ensures cloud resources are neither under-provisioned nor over-provisioned.

Track average unit costs

Your cloud utilization should be linked directly to your business growth. You can do this by tracking Unit costs. It is defined as the average cost levied by you that can be traced to a specific unit like a feature or customer team. It will give you a clear understanding of how your cloud spending is tied to revenue growth, which will in turn help you in allocating cloud funding for different functions.

Monitor your cloud costs in real-time

Teams must monitor and track cloud usage to get a realistic view of spend and utilization of resources and by extension of services, projects, and teams. Since the allocation of instances happens dynamically, you must ensure that your team has access to real-time visibility into your cloud infrastructure. Some cloud providers offer configurable dashboards so that you have easy access to necessary KPIs, reports, and insights.

Automate cloud cost optimization

As most of your development and IT operations team will be busy with application development and resource provisioning, cloud cost optimization may take a back seat. Instead of committing to a team, you can use digital solutions to implement AI-based insights and forecasts for ease of cloud management. These cloud optimization solutions assist you by recommending best practices and tips to maximize your ROI.

Make smart purchase decisions

Cloud resources can be budget-friendly if you can strategize your purchase decisions. Cloud providers offer several cost-effective options for your requirements:

• Reserved resources: You can get attractive discounts by purchasing cloud resources in a prepaid option. In this, you commit to use the resources in a specific availability zone for 1 – 3 years.
• Spot instances: Unlike prepaid plans, spot instances are last-minute purchase options. Cloud providers offer leftover cloud instances at low prices through auctions or on a first-come-first-serve basis. As these are unreliable resources, they come at a dirt-cheap price.

Maximize Cloud Investment with Prismberry

The necessity of cloud adoption cannot be overstated. It is one of the most important decisions for organizations in the current digital-first era. However, it requires companies to pay close attention to how they are utilizing their cloud investment. They must proactively identify under/over-provisioned resources to optimize the performance and cost. As a cloud services provider that has catered to the business needs of several companies across industries, we, at Prismberry, understand the financial strain cloud strategy has on companies, specifically small and medium-sized organizations. We remedy that by providing high-quality end-to-end cloud solutions.

Access Valuable Insights with DataVision

Reporting and visualization are critical for organizations to keep their cloud costs within the budget. These reports empower companies with insights for cloud cost optimization without getting carried away. For efficient cloud cost management, companies must rely on a robust cloud monitoring solution like Cloud DataVision. Built by Prismberry, DataVision manages your application and cloud performance through real-time visibility and a data-driven dashboard.

Get an exclusive demo of DataVision here.