How to Catch and Prevent Overspending on Cloud Services
We now live in a hyperconnected world, where almost all information is accessible to anyone, anywhere. In a time like this its no surprise that cloud technology is becoming increasingly normal. In a market where few existed, we now have a huge list of suppliers and data centres spanning the entire globe and with good reason. Giving businesses the benefits of anytime, anywhere access to data and applications; the ability to modernise and scale infrastructure and services without building and maintaining expensive IT assets; and improved security, regulatory compliance and Disaster Recovery was always going to be a no-brainer.
With the rate of growth of the cloud market its important that companies fully understand its capabilities and how it can work best for their company without overspending on products that they wont benefit from. it’s imperative that organisations find the right cloud storage solution that meets both their needs and their budget.
We have put together 5 questions you need to consider when looking at your current or future cloud usage which should help you better understand your spending and help you make decisions which make your cloud services work harder for you within your budget.
Most, if not all, organisations today have recognised the many competitive advantages that cloud computing brings to the digital landscape, but few have been able to adopt the technology with a consistent and optimised strategy to reduce costs.
Do we know how many open public cloud accounts we have?
Typically, an organisation will have multiple accounts with multiple cloud providers and because the public cloud is designed to empower anyone in an organisation to set up an account and allocate resources, those with authorisation to do so often create accounts without any centralised notification.
It’s simple to spin up an instance for a project and then forget to shut it down. Many teams deal with orphaned instances that have no ownership but still continue to generate costs. In the same vein, shadow IT projects often produce poorly accounted for resources in the cloud.
The end result is that no one within the organisation actually knows how many public cloud accounts the organisation has open
2. Do we understand our cloud bills?
Your cloud bill at the end of the month are large documents filled with lines of almost incomprehensible data if you don’t know what you are looking for, this can make it almost impossible to know what you are actually paying for, which in turn means you cant make any informed decision on where you can save on your spending
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Get in touch with your cloud providers and run though exactly what each part of your bills are and what you are spending the money on, then together with your finance and IT teams you can work out where you are overspending.
Can we match approved purchases to specific initiatives or cost centres?
Organisations with multiple teams, budgets and projects often do not have the time to map out their cloud storage and service consumption to assign it to projects and cost centres.
Some teams tend to over-provision resources just to add some extra capacity and create a ‘just in case’ buffer. The limited visibility or control of these resources might snowball into a huge problem over time and can result in regular recurring spending that cannot be explained and in many cases is not even needed.
Simply by matching cloud storage with consumption, organisations can optimise cloud storage costs and ensure they are not spending unnecessarily.
4. Are we paying for everything at on-demand prices?
With cloud technology it is very simple to add storage onto plans on an “as needed” basis. Whilst this is a great feature of the cloud it can also lead to overpaying for current storage which may not even be used. The issue with this on-demand approach is its more expensive, and if your whole cloud solution has been paid for in this way then your most likely still paying the on-demand premiums.
Taking time to fully plan out exactly what you are going to be using in advance is a great way to gain bigger discounts for from your cloud provider. The more information you give them, the easier they can forecast the hardware and service needs for your company allowing them to search for better pricing for their equipment which trickles down into discount for your company.
5. When did we last review our consumption?
The cost of cloud storage is more than just the cost per Gigabyte (GB), but there are additional costs applied each time data is moved in and out of the cloud. There might also be further costs applied to transfer data over the Internet. Just as it’s good practice to keep a track of your home’s energy consumption – and shop around to ensure you have the best deal – unless organisation’s do the same with their cloud storage (including the movement of that data) it’s impossible to have a clear understanding of your public cloud spend.
Cloud-storage is still an emerging and developing technology, it can be complicated and difficult to understand, but taking the time within your organisation to do so can give you a huge step up on the market and enable you to get the best possible use from your current providers within the company budget. Wasted storage is just wasted money, if you are able to answer the 5 questions above you should be well on your way to having a cost-effective cloud storage system for your organisation.
If you wish to understand more about cloud-storage and its prices, our IT experts can help, get in touch to find out more!
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