In 2024, as companies prepare to meet new efficiency requirements through elastic and scalable cloud services, CFOs and finance departments are worried about cloud cost management. To maximize the use of cloud resources and obtain the most affordable cloud service stacks, they are depending on their cloud service providers and internal cloud specialists.
Let us examine the typical errors that companies make that lead to an increase in their cloud budget.
1. Ignoring the Effect of Wasted Resources
storage,Similar to underutilized fitness centers, idle cloud resources such as virtual machines and storage accumulate fees without providing any benefit. Unknown waste could quickly consume up to 35% of your cloud services budget.
Determine these resources and periodically recover them using tools for automated monitoring and scaling.
2. Ineffective Resource Tagging Implementation
Consider labeling a cloud as tagging. Tracking expenses and determining resource ownership degenerate into a disorganized mess without appropriate tagging.
For future deployments, automate and standardize tagging across teams to preserve transparency in cloud cost management.
3. Ignoring the Planning for Reserved Instances
Reserved Instances (RIs) offer significant cost savings for predictable workloads. Examine your usage habits and make thoughtful investments in RIs to secure cloud cost savings for future requirements.
Plan and maximize cloud cost management savings by learning about and selecting an automated RI management solution, if necessary.
4. Neglecting the Optimization of Pricing Models
Making strategic use of the various cloud pricing models and being aware of them can have a big impact. Investigate serverless, spot instances, and pay-as-you-go options to meet your unique requirements and steer clear of overspending on fixed capacity.
A preview of cloud pricing models from top cloud providers, such as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Amazon Web Services (AWS), is already available to you here.
5. Steer clear of the Cloud Waste Discussion
Ignoring the problem will not make it go away. Talk openly about cloud waste in your company. Present cloud waste as a shared issue with opportunity for improvement rather than as a blame game.
Encourage teams to find and fix inefficiencies, and recognize previous cost-cutting efforts—no matter how minor—to build momentum and encourage ownership.
