Technology leaders need a cloud architecture that will meet performance requirements, achieve faster time to market, and quickly scale up or down as the business demands. It’s common for cloud bills to run over budget in the process. Fortunately, it’s also easily preventable with the following guidelines for  avoiding surprise cloud bills and keeping track of cloud costs.

The price you really pay

When a company receives its first bills from a public cloud provider, they typically experience sticker shock. To start, the bills are often well above budget. On top of that, Cloud services bills are cloud-friendly, but not necessarily business-friendly. Usually, these bills are categorized according to public cloud vendor services and not to the service they provide for the business. They contain multiple sections, thousands of lines and many types of charges.

This makes it a challenge to associate each charge with its purpose, allocate costs to end users or properly calculate the return on investment. This has led many companies to put a “just-in-case” cushion in their budget to pay for unexpected cloud bill expenses. Further complicating matters, there are four major unpredictable variables that usually impact planning for cloud project costs:

• Compute – virtual server instances
• Storage – amount that is provisioned in gigabytes
• Networking – inbound and outbound data transfer traffic
• Databases – building, deploying, and managing

These are the kinds of challenges that have led many CIOs to wonder what they can do to better understand and optimize cloud costs.

Making it work

From a business standpoint, enterprise technology leaders should go for the reserved capacity (instance) or committed use options whenever they can. These options are both cheaper and more predictable. They can also work on policies and procedures to ensure there are no untagged resources in the system. This will enable these leaders to see exactly what each application or workload is costing. Organizations can also establish a FinOps discipline where everyone takes ownership of their respective cloud usage. Moreover, they can adopt third-party cloud cost optimization tools to support these policies, procedures and disciplines and help solve the most complex problems associated with the cloud.

Also known as cloud financial management or cloud optimization tools, the best-of-breed software in this category features:

• Visibility and reporting to track costs across business units, applications, teams and other custom views
  
• Easy-to-implement savings recommendations which allow organizations to easily reduce cloud spend by up to 20-40%
  
• Forecasting and budgeting insights to improve planning and reduce wastage
  
• Anomaly detection in real-time using AI/ML-powered algorithms to react to unplanned spikes
  
• Ability to allocate costs and track chargeback/showback cloud costs based on end user or team consumption for improved accountability
  
• Container cost insights that allow you to obtain big picture details of cost by pod, namespace, etc., to guide your future optimization decisions

Proactively monitoring, managing and optimizing costs with such cloud cost optimization software allows organizations to better plan and forecast for growth in the cloud.

Maximizing cloud investments

The right cloud cost optimization software makes cloud bills clearer and more predictable. These tools provide insight and intelligence to substantially reduce cloud costs which will allow enterprises to fully take advantage of public cloud services. Many organizations have easily realized savings of 20% or more on their cloud spending just by using cloud optimization software and following best practices.

Cloud cost optimization isn’t a one-time action. It’s part of a journey in which you constantly focus and re-focus on optimizing the value of your enterprise’s cloud investment. Take the first step in your own journey toward maximizing your cloud investments and request a demo of Snow Cloud Cost.

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Due to the fast-paced technological development we have grown used to in IT, we have lived for some time in a disposable environment where equipment is quickly outdated and replaced in a bid to improve customer experience or outcomes. However, at some point, most of us have looked at a stack of equipment destined to be disposed of and thought of the cost. It is only a small jump to consider the cost to the environment as well. 

IT Leader Strategies for Sustainability 

A sustainable company is one which recognizes its corporate responsibility to lessen the harm it does to the environment and reduce its draw on global resources. Customers, employees and investors are increasingly looking to all companies to answer the call to action by developing their own sustainability measures, especially in the IT sphere.  

Snow Software and I have introduced a wide range of strategies such as supporting greener data centers, safely recycling endpoint devices, increasing reliance on cloud technologies and extending the life of hardware.  

Snow is not the only company recognizing the increasing importance of environmental efforts and the CIOs who embrace them. A recent Wall Street Journal article reported that many CIOs are focused on sustainability initiatives now that the relationship between digitization and carbon-based emissions is more apparent. 

In addition to the recycling of endpoint devices and the other examples listed above, these leaders’ wide-ranging efforts often include: 

• Improving data center efficiency
• Reducing electricity consumption
• Adopting technologies developed for energy optimization and waste reduction
• Increasing reliance on sustainable hardware certification programs

As CIO, I know that managing a global technology estate brings significant challenges. Prior to joining Snow, I already used their products to secure technology intelligence. I know that the insights gained through these products aid sustainability initiatives and assist those who still need to transition to a cloud computing model. Spending money on servers that are sitting and consuming power whilst being unproductive is not in the interests of business or the environment. By ensuring full visibility of the technology estate, wasted resources can be identified and eliminated.

Relocating as much as possible to the cloud (due to the greener credentials of the cloud providers vs. legacy data centers), leaves processing tasks to larger, more efficient providers. It also allows companies to run only the number of machines that they need at any one time, depending on the design. Utilizing auto-scaling technology efficiently allows a business to decrease their carbon footprint significantly and save cost.

Sustainability Certification and TCO Certified

To help ensure that we are holding ourselves to the highest standards in our hardware decisions, we at Snow Software partner with TCO Certified, the world-leading third-party sustainability certification for IT products which is independent from the IT industry and buyers. Snow products also now make use of the data that TCO Certified produces and incorporates that into the intelligence that our customers have about their technology estate, allowing them to make better decisions.  

Companies wishing to extend their corporate social responsibility beyond their own consumption can use hardware asset management tools such as those from Snow. These tools identify “end of life” assets so companies can consider how they can best utilize those assets to meet development goals, lessen waste, and reduce the global requirement for raw materials.  Donating their IT assets (after giving due regard to data removal) to charitable organizations which give individuals and communities access to basic services helps both the environment and a demographic in need.

Waste of resources, be they physical, environmental or financial, is becoming indefensible in the modern business climate. While it is certainly a challenge to find innovative ways to improve our consumption and impact on the environment, it is one that those who are in leadership roles in IT should take seriously. 

Alastair Pooley is the Chief Information Officer at Snow, where he is responsible for global IT strategy and implementation. He has presented at national and international conferences and maintains in industry-leading technical/security qualifications across AWS, Linux Professional Institute and ISC(2). Alastair also earned a BSc in Physics from the University of Warwick and was awarded an MBA from Cranfield University.

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