Cloud cost monitoring is an essential part of (cloud) cost management to maximize the business outcomes of cloud computing. But what is the best way to do it?
After reading the below article, you know:
- The importance of time-to-insights,
- How to empower employees,
- Which functionalities you need,
- What kind of tools there are,
- How to trial a best-of-breed solution.
Cloud costs are getting a bigger portion of the total IT budget year over year. The easiness of starting new cloud resources helps in speeding up innovation and reducing time-to-market. The need for cloud cost management is evident with increased cloud usage and high inflation.
In the above context, you want to ensure that every euro/dollar you spend on the cloud delivers as much value as possible.
Monitoring your cloud cost and then optimizing is CRUCIAL. It provides you with the insights needed to make decisions that maximize the business benefits of your cloud spend.
Time to insights
As you know, cloud resources can be initiated with a mouse click. With this easiness of starting resources comes the need for (near) real-time insights into cloud spend.
And in a dynamic, highly competitive environment with many economic and political uncertainties, time to insights is even more CRUCIAL.
ONLY with accurate (near) real-time data can you get the actionable insights to take the right business decisions.
Time to insights distinguishes a good data strategy from a bad data strategy.
So for monitoring your cloud costs, ensure you have a solution that provides (near) real-time, accurate data.
Empowerment
Monitoring and managing your cloud costs is not the responsibility of only one person.
Hopefully, you started using cloud computing to speed up innovation.
You want to ensure your innovation speed by allowing teams to start new resources on their own and not wait on management decisions.
But these gains come with “pains”.
Teams can use cloud resources where needed in relation to the business goals. In exchange for this gain, teams must manage their cloud costs (the pain?).
Ensure you delegate the responsibility to manage the cloud costs and empower the teams to do this. You can empower your teams by facilitating them with the right tools and coaching them.
With coaching, we mean asking to report the results so that you can give positive feedback and feedback for improvement.
This strengthens your teams while you are informed and have control over achieving the business goals.
Cloud cost monitoring tools
As mentioned above, time to insights with (near) real-time data and empowerment of the teams is crucial for cloud cost monitoring.
To monitor your cloud costs, you want to make sure you have the below functionalities.
Required functionalities
For cloud cost monitoring, you want at least to have the possibilities to:
- Manage budgets,
- Allocate costs to business entities,
- Alert on passing thresholds,
- See unassigned costs,
- Share dashboards.
There are different kinds of cloud cost monitoring solutions.
Please let us guide you through the different types.
Type of cloud cost monitoring tools
For cloud cost monitoring, there are three types of solutions:
- Native cloud cost management solutions,
- Cloud Management Platforms (CMP),
- Best-of-breed cloud cost management solutions.
Native cloud cost management solutions
Every cloud provider, like AWS, Azure, and Google, has a cloud cost management solution.
If you use these native solutions, you will experience that they are pretty technical in how the user interface presents the data.
And they all have a single cloud, their cloud 😉 focus.
So if you use multi-cloud, you need for sure another solution.
You should use these technical native cloud cost management solutions, but ensure you have an add-on solution that better fits your business needs.
Cloud Management Platforms (CMP)
The CMP’s have a broad general-purpose focus, with many functionalities to do it “all”.
But is “all” really possible?
Do you get the best cloud cost monitoring functionality if they deliver everything?
These CMPs miss the focus on a niche, a specialism, like cloud cost management.
These big monolithic applications are built and maintained by big organizations which are less flexible.
Often the implementation time of these big applications is long, and the costs for implementation and maintenance are pretty high.
Best-of-breed solutions
There are tools on the market focused on cloud cost management.
You can imagine that they have the best solution for cloud cost monitoring in detail.
Day in and day out, they are working on improving their solution for ONLY cloud cost management.
The organizations of these best-of-breed solutions are often; small, flexible, and innovative.
So if you need, for instance, a change, you can get this done more quickly than with these big companies.
Conclusion
Time-to-insights and empowerment of employees concerning the business goals are crucial for cloud cost monitoring.
You use cloud computing to achieve business goals like efficiency or innovation.
Make sure you monitor your cloud costs in relation to these business goals.
Select the tool that fits your business needs the best.
There is a shift in interest to best-of-breed tools focusing on deeper functionality in Cloud Cost Management.
These Cloud Cost Management solutions have the best functionality for the best prices. You have much more flexibility with these smaller applications and smaller organizations.
Try the best-of-breed solution
C-facts is such a best-of-breed cloud cost management solution. It has a business focus, (near) real-time data, and the best cloud cost monitoring functionality.
Both the demo and trial are free