FINAL WORD
IT projects often produce poorly accounted for resources in the cloud .
4 . Are we purchasing all our capacity at on-demand prices ?
The end result is that no one within the organisation actually knows how many public cloud accounts the organisation has open .
2 . Do we really understand our monthly cloud bills ?
On-demand pricing is considered the default pricing model for most cloud providers . It ’ s worth noting that the cost of enterprise cloud storage can vary greatly depending on particular use cases . Accessing data , capacity stored , retrieval frequency and network bandwidth all add to the cost .
Steve Wiggs , Data Centre Practice Lead ,
MTI Technologies
Cloud bills can be hard to understand . They ’ re long , complicated and hard to comprehend . A monthly cloud bill will likely contain a number of pages with various lines and reference many service names , instance types and regions – none of which are self-explanatory .
If you do not understand your monthly cloud bill , it ’ s difficult to know what you are paying for and therefore virtually impossible to make informed decisions about the services that are needed , those that could be reduced or to understand where the additional charges come from .
3 . Can we match approved purchases to specific initiatives or cost centres ?
Organisations with multiple teams , budgets and projects often do not have the time to map out their cloud storage and service consumption to assign it to projects and cost centres .
Some teams have a tendency to over-provision resources just to add some extra capacity and create a ‘ just in case ’ buffer . The limited visibility or control of these resources might snowball into a huge problem over time and can result in regular recurring spending that cannot be explained and in many cases is not even needed .
Simply by matching cloud storage with consumption , organisations can optimise cloud storage costs and ensure they are not spending unnecessarily .
Working as a pay-as-you-go method gives organisations the easiest means to buy additional storage , but in many cases , the organisation doesn ’ t actually need what you just purchased .
Furthermore , on-demand pricing is unlikely to be the most cost-effective solution . Just because on-demand pricing is an option , it doesn ’ t mean that it is the only option . Most cloud providers offer a way to pre-pay for usage that the customer projects they need .
By doing this , the cloud provider can better forecast their hardware and service needs , allowing them to get better discounts when buying the required hardware to support these services and passing on some of these savings to the cloud customer .
5 . When did we last review our consumption ?
The cost of cloud storage is more than just the cost per Gigabyte ( GB ), but there are additional costs applied each time data is moved in and out of the cloud . There might also be further costs applied to transfer data over the Internet .
Just as it ’ s good practice to keep a track of your home ’ s energy consumption – and shop around to ensure you have the best deal – unless organisations do the same with their cloud storage ( including the movement of that data ) it ’ s impossible to have a clear understanding of your public cloud spend .
Every wasted Gigabyte equals unnecessary cost
As the famous quote says : ‘ Knowledge is power ’ – and that ’ s certainly true when it comes to cloud storage costs . It can be challenging for organisations to get their arms around this , but by tackling the five key areas above it will help gain a much clearer picture of not only cloud consumption but egress too .
Unnecessary storage will increase costs . Know what you need , delete data that is no longer in use , cut down on data movement where possible and , most important of all , regularly review your cloud storage strategy . p
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