Tips for CEOs on reducing company’s public cloud cost.
Updated: Nov 24, 2022
Controlling cloud spend presents numerous challenges at the enterprise scale. Organizations that proactively and holistically manage their cloud environments get the most cloud for each dollar spent and ensure ongoing, cost-effective cloud operations.
Too often, enterprises second guess their cloud investments as sizeable and challenging to parse cloud provider bills mount. Many organizations struggling to curb their cloud costs wonder if they made the right decision to move to the cloud in the first place.
Cloud cost optimization can be achieved by identifying and remediating suboptimal cloud infrastructure provisioning and establishing best practices for cloud fiscal management. Enterprises can enjoy the benefits of elasticity, high availability, reliability, and agility.
Cloud cost optimization is the net result of successful Financial Operations (FinOps) – a set of business practices that link controls over the variable spend model of the cloud to financial accountability.
Successfully optimizing cloud costs requires the enterprise to master two distinct areas:
Intelligent Procurement of Cloud Services: Taking advantage of savings programs like cloud savings plans and capacity reservations addresses low-hanging savings opportunities
Intelligent Optimization of Cloud Capacity: Intelligently matching your cloud workloads to the optimal instance and resource configuration
Approaches for FinOps include:
Reducing compute costs in the cloud by continuously rightsizing and strategically utilizing Reserved Instances and Savings Plans to take advantage of even more significant discounts.
Identifying and resolving hidden line items that may be secretly contributing to excess cloud spend
Building a culture of cost awareness and increasing cloud spend consciousness across teams through tactics like show back/chargeback and automated reporting.
Establishing a well-defined Cloud Operating Model and a FinOps organization or Cloud Center of Excellence.
Cloud cost optimization does not have to be complicated. Still, it does require a disciplined approach that establishes good rightsizing habits and continuously drives insights and action through analytics to lower your cloud bill and the bottom line.
The ideas mentioned above are meant as information to ease your organizational processes. However, if you would like a more detailed overview, do not hesitate to reach out to me at rizwan.khan@mac.com.
I have years of experience building Technology and providing Technology Due Diligence as a CTO, and I am available for fruitful discussions.
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