Often referred to as one of the most important technological innovations of the 21st century, cloud services have seen rapid adoption in recent times. The meteoric rise in the adoption of cloud services can largely be attributed to their capability of fitting the use case of an organization of any size. Ranging from efficiency to security issues, cloud services have allowed organizations to tackle the pandemic head-on. The prime benefit of using cloud services is the cost-effective factor it brings for an organization.
Unlike traditional on-prem infrastructure, cloud services allow users access to the latest technological advancements, which helps them create custom workloads and deploy them across the entire infrastructure with minimal delay. With enhanced scalability options, organizations don’t ever have to worry about expensive and cumbersome infrastructure upgrades and can quickly scale according to their needs.
Challenges in Controlling Cloud Costs
However, this rapid adoption of cloud services has also led many companies shelling out more than their pre-defined budgets due to unexpected cost sprawls. The ultimate goal of cloud migration for any organization is to optimize expenses according to the financial resources at hand and get the most out of every dollar. Unlike traditional on-prem infrastructure with high up-front costs, cloud services count as an operational expense. A majority of organizations do not have the expertise to handle cloud usage effectively, leading to high costs. Due to this, cloud bills quickly spiral out of control, and the organization is unable to get the desired ROI.
In such scenarios, resources are often left unseen and pile up. The teams in charge of maintaining the organization’s cloud infrastructure then have no concrete answers for the sudden rise in bills. By the time they get the resources in order, the organization has already shelled a significant chunk on unused or under-utilized resources. The billing structure of cloud service providers is also often not easy for organizations to understand. As a result, organizations often lose out on cost savings that they hoped cloud technology would bring to them.
Controlling Cloud Cost Sprawls
Optimization
One of the most critical aspects of managing a fruitful cloud infrastructure is optimization. The first step in having an optimized cloud is the proper optimization of workloads and resources in the entire infrastructure. Many reasons can lead to unexpected cost spikes, with some common culprits being orphaned resources, overprovisioned resources, idle resources, reserved capacity, etc. Organizations need to focus on eliminating unused and under-utilized resources in order to reduce their wastage and plug cost leaks.
Improved Visibility
The next step in getting the most of your cloud is improved visibility. Proper visibility into a cloud infrastructure allows its users to discover underutilized resources, thus bringing significant savings on cloud bills. Proper visibility into the cloud also helps avoid hidden costs. Such hidden charges often increase as an organization scales, eventually leading to a more significant budget burden if left unchecked. When an organization is using a few workloads, the visibility takes a back seat due to the presence of a small pool of resources. However, as an organization scales, visibility becomes important as it is difficult for organizations to introduce a huge workforce to manage the complex infrastructure. Such instances with minimal oversight often lead to unexpected cloud bills.
Reporting
Organizations using cloud services often have a decentralized control system in place for the infrastructure. While this brings rewards in some ways, it can often lead to widespread anarchy across the infrastructure. Efficient reporting introduces automatically triggered alarms to your infrastructure according to a set of pre-defined rules. With proper reporting, users can introduce budgets for individual services and receive alerts if these pre-defined budgets are crossed, ensuring no sudden cost spikes.
Security
Cloud security might not appear as a direct cost-saver for an organization, but even a momentary lapse in security can expose organizations to multiple threats. Exposure to any threat not only hampers the trust and business of an organization, but its resolution also involves extensive costs. Apart from this threat, inefficient use of resources can often lead to degradation of the organization’s performance due to the absence of dedicated checks to ensure improved overall performance.
Here’s How Centilytics Helps
An intelligent CMP such as Centilytics brings a curated list of products targeted at helping you address the aforementioned issues. Centilytics presents all the information about your cloud in a single-pane-of-glass view. Cost leaks and unexpected cloud bills are a thing of the past with Centilytics’ proven expertise.
At Centilytics, we believe in a proactive style of cloud management. Hence, everything from cloud optimization to cloud security, or even governance and reporting, elevates you to a proactive level so that you get the maximum ROI from your cloud.
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