Are you grappling with the complexities of managing costs and resources in a multi-cloud environment? You're not alone. As businesses increasingly adopt a multi-cloud strategy to leverage the unique features and capabilities of different cloud platforms, they face the challenge of optimizing costs and resources.
Cloud computing and storage may be more cost-effective than on-premises options, but they are still not cheap. Recent surveys found that over a third of businesses (37%) spend more than $12 million annually on cloud storage, and that over eighty percent (80%) spend more than $1.2 million.
Investment in cloud-based monitoring systems is a big financial commitment for most businesses. The expense of the cloud can quickly escalate beyond what many businesses can afford without careful monitoring and management.
Challenges in managing cloud spend
One of the primary challenges in managing cloud spend is striking the right balance between cost and performance. Organizations need to ensure they are leveraging cloud resources effectively while keeping costs low. Identifying cloud resources that may no longer be needed or can be scaled down to save costs is another challenge. Moreover, managing cloud sprawl is crucial to prevent overspending on cloud resources that are not being used effectively.
In fact, a McKinsey report states that "Around 80% of enterprises consider managing cloud spend a challenge." But what are the main issues? So, the biggest cloud cost management problems include:
- Lack of visibility over the cloud spending: Companies without the correct cloud spending tools may unearth hidden expenses. Cloud users may waste money by misinterpreting cost statistics.
- Budget miscalculations: With many cloud resources, cloud spending forecasting is difficult. Changing your roadmap or performing certain actions quickly increases cloud prices. Also, inaccurate budget forecasts might hurt cloud cost management. Cloud cost management technologies examine your resources to anticipate accurately. They forecast using previous data and patterns.
- Complex billing: Every company building workloads in the cloud should ensure all departments understand their invoices. Development teams, for example, can shift their focus on efficiency, often forgetting cloud cost management. To simplify invoicing, make chargebacks visible.
- Bottom line: Complex pricing structures, billing, poor architecting, etc. make cloud cost management difficult for most enterprises.
Strategies for cloud cost optimization
To optimize cloud costs, companies are implementing several strategies. Regularly reviewing cloud usage and costs to identify inefficiencies is a common approach. Automated cost optimization tools are also leveraged to manage costs more effectively. These tools provide critical insights into cloud usage and costs, helping organizations identify areas of potential waste and optimize resources to reduce costs. Additionally, organizations are working closely with their cloud providers to take advantage of cost-saving programs, such as reserved instances and spot instances.
Impact of multi-cloud adoption
Multi-cloud adoption has significantly impacted organizations by improving agility and flexibility while reducing costs. By leveraging multiple cloud providers, organizations can take advantage of the unique features and capabilities of each cloud platform, avoiding vendor lock-in. This approach enables rapid deployment of new applications and services, while also reducing the risk of downtime or data loss. IDC predicted that by 2022, over 90% of enterprises worldwide will be relying on a mix of on-premises/dedicated private clouds, multiple public clouds, and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructure needs.
The role of cloud cost optimization in business strategy
Cloud cost optimization is a critical component of an organization's overall cloud strategy. It enables the most effective use of cloud resources while minimizing costs. Organizations can invest in other critical areas of their business, such as research and development, thereby improving their bottom line when they optimize their cloud spend. In fact, Gartner predicts that through 2024, nearly all legacy applications migrated to public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) will require optimization to become more cost-effective.
The Kubeark way
With Kubeark's software operations solution, you can simplify deployment and scaling, effortlessly deploying and managing software across multi-cloud environments with dynamic templates and streamlined release management. You can also ensure reliability and governance, maintaining software with automated audits, compliance checks, and built-in revisions while adapting to changing environments.
Wrapping up
In a multi-cloud world, optimizing costs and resources is not just about saving money. It's about making strategic decisions that drive business growth and innovation. According to OpsRamp, cost management (84%) is the top reason why organizations are considering multi-cloud, followed by performance efficiency (80%) and risk mitigation (79%). Understanding the challenges and implementing effective strategies, organizations can harness the power of the multi-cloud to drive business success.
Are you ready to take control of your multi-cloud costs and resources? Discover how Kubeark can help. Request a personalised demo!