With 200+ comprehensive services and per-second billings offered by AWS, it’s extremely challenging to allocate your cloud costs to 100% of their potential. And, amidst increasing AWS bills, losing such significant amounts because of inadequate allocation can be a primary concern. As a solution to this, businesses are utilizing cloud tagging; however, that also brings several obstacles to the table.

In this blog, we will delve deep into cloud tagging, its challenges, and how nOps Business Contexts can solve the tagging challenges.

What Is Cloud Tagging?

Cloud tagging is a process of assigning metadata to cloud resources. This metadata provides additional information about the cloud resources, such as their purpose, owner, or cost center. Cloud tags are key-value pairs that are attached to cloud resources. These tags can be used to filter, search, or categorize cloud resources based on their metadata. For every tag, you can define a key and an optional value. 

You can explore more details about tagging at Understanding Chargeback Tagging And The Best Practices!

Why Is Cloud Tagging Important?

Cloud tagging is essential for several reasons. Firstly, it helps organizations track their cloud costs accurately. By assigning tags to cloud resources, companies can identify the cost center responsible for a particular resource. This information can accurately allocate cloud costs to the respective cost centers. Secondly, cloud tagging can help organizations to optimize their cloud spending. By analyzing cloud resource usage data based on tags, companies can identify underutilized or unused cloud resources and take appropriate action to optimize their usage. Thus, cloud tagging offers a comprehensive approach to cloud cost allocation. 

What Are The Challenges To AWS Tagging?

Here are some of the most common challenges to AWS tagging:

  • Lack of Standardization: 

One of the significant challenges to AWS tagging is the lack of standardization. Organizations often have different approaches to tagging their resources, which can result in inconsistent tagging practices. This inconsistency can make managing and identifying resources difficult, leading to errors and mismanagement. 

  • Inconsistent Tagging: 

Even when organizations have standardized tagging practices, enforcing them can be difficult. It is common for users to forget to add tags, use incorrect tags, or use different tags for the same type of resource. An appropriate example is that for a tag about “production,” departments can use “prod,” “production,” “PROD,” and “prod1,” and the list does not tend to end. Plus, the occasional typos are an overhead concern here. 

  • Undefined Resources:

More challenging are resources that cannot be assigned tags, such as business support and bandwidth costs. This lack of tag-ability can make it difficult to allocate these costs to the right resources or cost centers, leading to inaccurate cost allocation and potential budget overruns. It also makes it difficult to understand the actual cost of using AWS services and to identify opportunities for cost optimization.

  • Shared Cost Allocation: 

Your AWS bill contains various line items, such as purchasing a saving plan or incurring bandwidth costs for business support. These costs are not associated with a particular resource or a particular team; thus, it’s hard to allocate them appropriately. 

 Although AWS tagging is an essential tool for managing cloud resources, it comes with its own challenges. Organizations need to address these challenges to ensure effective and consistent tagging practices, which lead to better resource management, cost optimization, and security.

How Is nOps Adding Business Contexts To Every Dollar Of Your AWS Spend?

nOps Business Contexts gives our users the unparalleled ability to access and allocate every dollar of their cloud spend in real-time.

What is it?

nOps Business Contexts is a cloud management platform that simplifies AWS infrastructure management by providing visual insights into cloud usage, cost optimization, security, and compliance. To be precise, it helps you allocate every single dollar of AWS spend by handling untagged and miss-tagged resources.

Inconsistent tagging?

One of the most significant challenges of managing cloud infrastructure is tagging. It’s crucial to have an accurate and consistent tagging strategy to ensure that resources are correctly labeled and easy to identify. Also, the tagging challenges mentioned above can be a significant hurdle to cloud cost management. nOps Business Contexts provides an automated tagging solution that identifies all the resources across the entire AWS infrastructure and assigns the correct tags. It ensures that all resources are accurately tagged and eliminates the risk of manual errors.

  • For inconsistent tagging, it helps you combine all the concerned tags to make an informed decision for your tagging policies.
Inconsistent tagging
  • For undefined resources, nOps establishes rules based on various factors such as accounts, regions, specific services, usage types, or operations. These rules can be used to attribute the expenses to a particular Showback value or distributed among multiple cost centers as needed.
Environment Showbacks
  • As shared costs need to be distributed across multiple teams and business units based on their nature, nOps Business Contexts allocates costs effectively by distributing them using fixed percentages or proportionate weightage that takes into account varying usage among teams or services.
Unallocated resources

Why is it the ultimate solution to all tagging challenges?

nOps Business Contexts is irreplaceable because it simplifies the entire tagging process, saving businesses time and resources. It provides a centralized platform for AWS infrastructure management, allowing users to monitor all resources in one place. 

Whether it be typo errors, different perception concerns, or the shared costs challenges, nOps takes care of all! Its automated tagging solution ensures that resources are accurately labeled and easily identified, leading to improved compliance and better security practices. 

Your team focuses on innovation, while nOps runs optimization on auto-pilot to help you track, analyze and optimize accordingly! Our customers can benefit in two key ways: 

  • First, pay less for what you use without the financial risk. 
  • Second, use less by automatically pausing idle resources. 

Let us help you save! Sign up for nOps today.