How a Cloud Management Platform Can Help You Achieve the Financial Benefits You Were Promised

Running a growing and evolving set of public cloud services in a dynamic environment can easily get out of hand from both a managerial standpoint as well as financial.

Early on, enterprises embraced the cloud primarily as a way to save money. But just as “server sprawl” was a problem with data centers, “cloud sprawl” has quickly become a challenge for companies going all-in on cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform. The cloud is scalable and elastic, but with this new ability to scale resources up and down comes the risk of underutilizing or wasting resources you forget about over time—negating any potential cost savings in the cloud.

Purchasing Cloud Resources

To further complicate the cost of the cloud, instances can be purchased at different rates, depending on how and when they are used. When left to individuals across different departments, teams, and business units, purchase decisions are less than optimal.

They say you shouldn’t shop for groceries when you’re hungry, at risk of over-buying. The same applies to acquiring instances: Buying On-Demand instances is the most expensive way to use the cloud, but Reserved Instances (RI) require long-term commitments to achieve discounts and savings.

Easy Enterprise Cloud Cost Management Strategies to Start Saving Money

We have seven best practices we suggest for getting a handle on your cloud costs and reducing your cloud bills. These strategies include: 

1. Find unused or unattached resources
2. Identify and consolidate idle resources
3. Utilize heatmaps 
4. Right Size Computing Services
5. Invest in AWS Reserved Instances (RIs) or Azure Reserved VM Instances (RIs)
6. Take Advantage of Spot Instances
7. Consider Multi-Cloud vs. Single Cloud

If these steps seem intimidating, you can enlist the help of a cloud management platform (CMP). A cloud cost management platform like CloudCheckr can examine usage, recognize trends, predict patterns, and help enterprise businesses make optimal purchasing decisions, automatically. CloudCheckr can also enforce best practice checks to make sure only authorized users are spinning up instances, ensuring your cloud stays in check as you scale.

CloudCheckr goes even further, offering the ability to rebalance Reserved Instances across multiple organizations to leverage discounts. CloudCheckr also supports AWS Savings Plans, which allows customers to purchase resources at an hourly rate. A CMP with the ability to start-and-stop instances to ensure you stick to a schedule that optimizes your Savings Plan is crucial to seeing the financial impact AWS intends.

Enterprises today need to be quick and lean, which is why the cloud is so attractive. But they also need to stay safe as  you grow—which is why a comprehensive cloud management platform should unify cost and security management with compliance capabilities and self-healing automation. With a full-service CMP like CloudCheckr, modern enterprises can reduce cloud sprawl, right-size their cloud, and enforce security best practices to see the financial benefits they were promised.

We deliver total visibility—across multiple public clouds and hybrid workloads—making immediate cost savings achievable from the most complex cloud infrastructure. From government agencies to large enterprise and managed service providers, CloudCheckr customers deploy our SaaS solution, CloudCheckr CMx, to secure, manage, and govern the most sensitive environments in the world.

Simplify your enterprise cloud cost management

Request your free CloudCheckr trial now.