Six key points for effectively controlling the company's cloud costs
Many companies' actual cloud expenditures exceed the budget, so they must try every means to "not exceed the budget". This article introduces six key points for reducing cloud costs.
In 2018, the daily unplanned cloud cost of Adobe software development team was up to 80000 dollars, US server The final cost exceeds US $500000.
Adobe is not the only company that is surprised by unpredictable cloud costs; In fact, nearly 60% of enterprises' cloud expenditures exceed their budgets.
How can IT managers ensure that cloud budgets are not overspent?
1. Manage assets
A large amount of cloud spending comes from the end user department, because it is easy to use cloud resources without informing the IT department. Unfortunately, this cloud expenditure is finally included in the IT budget of the entire enterprise. At some point, the CEO and the board may start to focus on overall IT spending.
The IT department can never eliminate the shadow IT expenditure of users, but the IT department can implement an IT asset management system for the entire enterprise, which can immediately discover new online services. In this way, the services used secretly are immediately visible, and the cost is the same.
2. Throw away waste
Part of the asset management process is to ensure a return on IT investment. If IT assets such as cloud services are not fully utilized, they should be fully utilized or the implementation should be canceled.
3. Don't store worthless data
Many enterprises initially store all inbound data. To avoid clutter in their internal data centers, they send too much unused data to the cloud. If your company is one of these enterprises, it is time to evaluate what data has been sent to the cloud to determine whether it is worth saving. If it is not worth saving, discard the data to reduce cloud spending.
4. Horizontal comparison between cloud cost and local IT cost
The cost value of the cloud seems cheaper than the processing and storage in the local data center, because you don't have to buy equipment and strengthen the internal IT infrastructure. However, you really need to have enough bandwidth to access and download/upload data and process it from the cloud, which may cost a lot of money.
If the usage exceeds the normal limit, the cloud provider will also specify the high cost in the contract terms. When comparing cloud costs with local costs, you must pay attention to the peak demand for processing and storage. See if these can be included in the usual cloud cost formula to avoid being surprised by the high cost.
5. Involve the financial department
The financial department is very good at interpreting complex cost formulas and helping to deduce the estimated cost when you are modeling the return on cloud investment cost. On the other hand, IT departments are not good at this. It's good for you to ask for help from the financial department when forecasting cloud costs.
6. Fine tune IT infrastructure
If all you do is migrate applications and systems to the cloud, you are unlikely to gain the cost saving benefits of the cloud. If you are designing an application that spans multiple clouds and local resources, the cost will not be effective. The solution is to redesign the structure of your systems and applications so that they can efficiently use all the resources they use, both locally and in the cloud.
Conclusion
Gartner estimates that in 2018, more than 80% of enterprise organizations will overspend on IaaS cloud costs. Other cloud service costs may be similar.
Exceeding the cloud budget is a problem that needs to be avoided.
In this way, it is necessary for the IT department to work with the financial department or external consultants to ensure that the cost model and forecast of cloud resources are realistic, so as to avoid cost overruns that may have a negative impact on the funds of other IT projects.
