How do you control and keep your cloud cost to a minimum?

We all agree that cloud computing can be cheaper than purchasing your own hardware and software and maintaining your own servers.  But, when it comes to cloud computing, one of the questions we need to be concerned with is what the real costs are?

In fact, it is difficult to understand what the costs are when starting out a relationship with some cloud providers, some cloud providers don’t make pricing available until you sign up for their service, while others use metrics to compute pricing that is different than what you would use in a physical system.  This becomes a real challenge for an IT manager who is researching cloud computing companies.

Read the fine print

The first thing you want to do is make sure you know and understand the terms of your cloud provider contract. You need to read the fine print and understand what you are going to pay for and how it will be measured.

It is important that you choose the right pricing model, the one that will suit your business needs, without using unnecessary resources. For example, you should decide if private, community or hybrid clouds are better suited for your business in terms of security measures and whether choosing a PaaS or IaaS over SaaS approach makes the most sense.

Establish clear management and maintenance costs

A cloud solution should raise profits. One of the biggest advantages for cloud computing is eliminating the maintenance responsibility. Well, the thing is, that is not always 100% true. Sometimes you will still have servers and resources that need to be supported by your own IT department, so you need to take that into consideration.

Also, individual departments are increasingly choosing their own technology, including cloud services, which are relatively easy to engage and use. IT departments and a company’s top executive may be totally unaware of what is being used therefore creating unplanned costs.

Monitor your cloud cost

At the same time, another useful option to achieve minimum cloud cost is using available tools or software that will help you monitor your accounts from a single dashboard. Once you sign up, you can add your cloud service accounts to your dashboard. This way, you have access to reports that help you allocate your monthly costs down to departments and individual employees and monitor overall usage and spikes so that you can plan for costs and tune your environment to decrease costs.

In the end, the answer comes down to how closely you are able to manage, follow and adjust your infrastructure. If you choose to just throw your applications into the cloud without monitoring, than you should be ready for a surprise when you get your bill, but if you thoroughly analyze and plan your goals and objectives, you will be successful in managing the costs and resources in your cloud.

Photo source: https://www.sxc.hu/photo/1290133