Evaluation Factors Of Cloud Cost Optimization Tool
When your mindset takes a paradigm shift to the cloud, it’s time you start considering factors like public vs. private cloud costs, Capex vs. Opex, Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and, a strategic approach to cloud cost optimization.
However, even if you manage to get through these, the complexity of public cloud spend management is still unnerving.
Having said that, we cannot overlook I&O leaders, the ones dealing with public, private, and multi-cloud service management. Spotting the dark underbelly of your cloud operations requires a clear, complete understanding of what you are actually spending on and how you can optimize if overspent.
Though cloud cost management tools help businesses get clarity on their cloud spending, identify cloud usage trends and address expense-related problems, infrastructure & operations (I&O) leaders must first look for the four Gartner-advised evaluation areas to choose the right tool for their cloud:
- Strategize — Prior to drawing in a cloud service provider (CSP), I&O pioneers or decision-makers must have a strategy and the flexibility to choose among multiple providers, and if possible, to settle on the most favorable terms. Keep your gates open for as many options as available in the marketplace for there should be anything but a monopoly. Early decisions are important to make on the grounds that the service providers will persistently work in terms to make it hard for you to switch, for example, re-platforming your database or migrating your data from the existing vendor to another is going to cost you a lot.
- Track — I&O leaders must emphasize the factor, whether they are able to track the utilization of and spending on cloud resources, including the ability to ascribe the spending to organizational units, business initiatives, projects, activities, et cetera. They must have a high-resolution lens that gives them complete visibility into their actual utilization versus what was estimated and planned in near-real-time. Evaluating this key area while choosing the cloud cost optimization tool is essential.
- Reduce — I&O leaders are often challenged for reducing organization-wide cloud spending. They need an approach to distinguish resources that are over-provisioned and rightsize them whenever required. Also, I&O leaders need to stay updated about the changes and offers in the pricing models of cloud providers.
- Streamline — Businesses require detailed and actionable insights from the cloud consumption analytics displayed by the tool they are using. To be able to figure out the practices that would help utilize resources more productively and cost-effectively is a primary to look for. They should also evaluate on the ability to streamline their cloud operations, such as data transfer costs, Reserved Instances (in AWS), etc. based on relevant recommendations provided by the cloud spend management tool itself.