3 Cloud Cost Management Strategies for Growing Businesses

Cloud computing is an increasingly popular way of delivering computing resources over the internet. It allows organizations to access and store data without having to build and maintain their own physical infrastructure. This shift to cloud has helped countless companies access resources that were historically only available to enterprises with large infrastructure budgets.

You may have been sold on the promise that cloud would be cheaper, easier, and overall just better. But many companies are discovering that that’s only true up to a point. While the digital transformation of business brought tons of advantages, executives are finding out the hard way that it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. Many are now rebelling against skyrocketing costs and added restrictions.

While you may think diligent cloud cost management is a no brainer, many companies “set it and forget it”, and end up spending far more than they should as a result. We often see this in growing businesses. As your usage and needs increase, slowly but surely spend creeps upward. It’s easy to overlook. And then before you know it, half of your IT budget disappears every month with no end in sight!

Effective cloud cost optimization will reduce unnecessary spending on cloud services, while still ensuring that the organization has access to the resources it needs. In this article, we’ll cover cloud cost management best practices and ways you can prevent spend from ballooning.

Multi-cloud strategy is a popular approach to maximize savings and increase flexibility in cloud computing. By leveraging the strengths of multiple cloud vendors, and even multiple types of cloud service (i.e. public, hybrid, or private), organizations can build a multi-cloud architecture that optimizes their workloads and maximizes cost savings.

Multi-cloud strategy allows organizations to compare different cloud service providers and choose the best one for varying needs. This approach helps identify the best service provider and cloud infrastructure setup for different workloads, as well as identify areas where you can save money by switching vendors or utilizing different services.

Ingress & Egress

At OpenMetal, we’ve found a multi-cloud approach to work especially well for companies that primarily deliver their services over the internet, such as hosting and public cloud providers. Many service providers allow users to add and store data in the cloud free of cost. However, when you want to retrieve that data or move it elsewhere, you’ll pay a fee. This is known as data egress, and egress charges can drastically increase your bill – especially when your entire business operates from the cloud. Providers can (and do) impose charges for any sort of data transfer, whether it is to another cloud service, a different region, from storage to memory, or even between applications.

Ingress fees – the cost incurred to bring your data into their ecosystem – are pretty much nonexistent. So why are egress charges a thing? 1) So they can advertise low prices to reel you in. And 2) To make it harder for you to leave the provider’s service. If you’ll pay a massive fee to move your data elsewhere, you’re less likely to do so. Much like the Hotel California, they want it to be easy to get in, tough to leave.

As you’re deciding what data should live under what cloud system, think about how that data will be stored, accessed, secured, moved, and made available now and in the future. Ensure you know the ingress and egress costs levied by certain providers before you sign up for their service. Think about where it makes sense to use private clouds, public clouds, or a hybrid approach.

With the right multi-cloud strategy, organizations can maximize savings while having access to a wide variety of features and capabilities.

Rightsizing is the process of optimizing resource utilization by scaling up or down when necessary. Rebalancing helps to distribute resources according to the needs of the application.

Utilizing both of these strategies effectively ensures that everything gets what it needs, when it needs it. No more, no less. You’ll only pay for exactly what you need.
Implementing these techniques will generally require help from a specialized service. Sometimes, modern cloud providers have these processes baked into their offering, which is the most convenient option.

Autonomous workload optimization, rightsizing, and rebalancing frees up employee time, allows for more efficient operations, provides a better user experience, and eliminates unnecessary spend.