Hidden Costs of Cloud: Uncovering the Various Sources of Cloud Overspending

Hidden Costs of Cloud: Uncovering the Various Sources of Cloud Overspending
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According to Gartner, enterprise IT spending is expected to increase by 51% on public cloud computing by the end of 2025. It means a greater part of IT budgets will be dedicated to the use of public cloud services. In that case, have you ever wondered what percentage of your cloud spends are optimized?  

Besides, recent surveys show that 30% of cloud spendings are usually wasted. But are you sure your organization is more efficient? If not, you’re just at the right place. This article will help you to become more efficient with optimizing cloud spends by uncovering the various overspending sources. 

ALSO READ: How to Train People When Moving to Cloud 

Embracing FinOps 

Cloud FinOps, also known as Financial Operations for the Cloud, is a practice that emerged to help IT organizations optimize their cloud spending and ensure that resources are being used efficiently and cost-effectively. It combines financial management principles with cloud-specific best practices to provide visibility and control over cloud costs. 

Go through the following examples to kickstart your goals for cloud cost optimization. 

Right-size Infrastructure 

Over-provisioning resources can lead to wasted spend and unnecessary costs. It’s important to regularly review and monitor the usage of resources to ensure they match the actual needs of the workloads. By right-sizing resources, organizations can reduce costs while still ensuring adequate performance. 

Carefully Select the Regions 

Where workloads are positioned can have a significant impact on cloud computing costs. Factors such as data privacy regulations, compliance requirements, and data sovereignty laws can also impact the decision of where to put workloads.  

Developers may not always have visibility into these factors, which is why it is critical for the Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) or other governing bodies within an organization to provide guidance and oversight on the selection of cloud regions and providers. 

Embrace Multi-cloud Strategy 

The competition among three big cloud infrastructure providers, i.e., Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), has increased in recent years. It benefits cloud consumers as it leads to more options and lower costs.  

Running a multi-cloud environment helps organizations take advantage of the strengths of different providers and potentially lower costs. For instance, AWS is often considered to be ahead of the competition in terms of advanced services. But for workloads that don’t require those services, using another provider could be more cost-effective.  

However, it’s important to keep in mind that running a multi-cloud environment can also increase complexity, as different cloud providers have different service offerings, pricing models, and management tools. 

Minimize Idle Workloads

Many workloads do not run 24×7 and identifying the usage patterns of these workloads can be a valuable source of cost savings. But, to effectively manage these workloads at scale, automation is required.  

By implementing automated scaling policies, it is possible to adjust the number of resources based on usage patterns. This can also help to reduce costs by only provisioning the resources that are needed at a given time.