If you do not have an effective cloud cost management plan, managing your costs for cloud data can be a complex affair. With the recent shift to remote and hybrid working, most businesses are increasingly migrating their workloads to the cloud to provide seamless data access. When companies provide unlimited data access, this leads to an increase in cloud spending.

The cloud can have several business units with associated costs. These include:

  • Object storage costs 
  • Data transfer costs 
  • Networking costs 
  • Computing costs- associated with CPUs, RAM, and compute capacity.

Managing these costs is a difficult task, as the AWS (Amazon Web Services) pricing model tends to be highly complicated. That is why most cloud users prefer a usage-based pricing model, so you only pay for what you use. Regardless of the pricing model, most organizations still overspend due to improper cost management practices.

What are the Challenges to Optimizing Cloud Costs?

Some of the major cloud cost management challenges include:

Lack of Visibility into Cloud Spend

Lack of  visibility into spending practices is one of the main challenges in cloud cost management. Because some companies don’t have the right tools to determine cloud spending, they may find hidden costs. Also, because cloud users may not interpret cost reports in the right way, they may spend more than they need to.  To resolve these issues, give access to cloud expense reports, so everyone understands how their activity affects expenditures. In addition, implement software with deep visibility capabilities that gives you more insight into your cloud expenditures. 

The right cloud management tool can reveal and eliminate hidden costs associated with the cloud. If you want to manage cloud costs, choose a management tool that gives you a holistic view of all cost centers in your cloud. A comprehensive view of cost and usage reports could help optimize cloud costs.

Inaccurate Budget Forecasts 

It is challenging to forecast cloud expenditure, especially when you have numerous cloud resources. You may change your roadmap along the way, or you may perform specific tasks, which escalates cloud costs quickly. 

An inaccurate budget forecast can be detrimental to the cloud cost management process. If you are under budget, you may jeopardize an active application. Over-budgeting your cloud costs means you are paying for what you do not use. Instead of relying on estimates, use a test environment to estimate what you will use in the future. 

Some cloud cost management tools analyze the state of your resources to provide accurate forecasts. They rely on historical data and trends to give you a view of what to expect.

Poor Cloud Architecting

AWS released the AWS Well-Architected Framework to help cloud engineers and developers to build secure, reliable, and scalable workloads. This process makes reliable, efficient, and secure apps. Without the AWS Well-Architected process, applications would be vulnerable to crashing and attacks by hackers. However, most AWS users do not architect their resources appropriately, which leads to unauthorized data access and data loss.

Complex Billing

Billing is complex, and can’t be entrusted to the finance team alone. 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. All chargebacks should be made transparent to avoid billing complexities.

The Bottom Line

Cloud cost management can be a menace to most organizations, due to complex pricing models, billing, poor architecting, etc. It’s imperative to use a robust cloud cost management tool that allows you to gain visibility into your AWS resources to avoid billing complexities.

nOps provides a wide range of cost optimization capabilities to help you keep cloud spending at a low. With nOps, you can easily understand your billing, get accurate budget forecasts, and architect your workloads perfectly. 

Start your nOps free trial today, or schedule a demo to get started!