Managing cloud costs
Nearly half of the 1000 respondents to a survey said that their cloud costs were higher than what they expected. Another 100 said that they were way higher than they expected, meaning that 6 out of 10 companies were spending more than they expected on their cloud. To an extent, those organizations may actually be doing well even to know that. The State of Cloud Intelligence 2022 Report revealed that only about 3 out of 10 companies even knew exactly where they were spending money on the cloud. It’s not hard to see why that is the case. The folks working on this know that cloud bills are incredibly long, complex, and unreadable manually. In fact, the point has been made that an Amazon Cost & Usage Report can’t be loaded into Excel because it’s too large! This situation is unlikely to become any better as cloud usage becomes more flexible, dynamic, and agile. The adoption of cloud tools, coming of industry clouds, and SaaS products are only going to make the analysis even harder. That’s why we are exploring modern methods to monitor cloud usage. This demands a comprehensive view, right from cloud strategy design to implementation and ongoing monitoring. Automation is a crucial element of this effort, to understand exactly how the cloud is being used, or wasted! There is a range of exciting application approaches that can be leveraged here. AIOps is a great way to monitor the entire infrastructure landscape to ensure it is tuned to deliver application performance. Add to that FinOps, as a way to automate the tracking of resource utilization and the associated costs. As cloud usage has surged, cloud management and costs have become very important facets for enterprises. It’s easy to see why that is the case.