Achieving the cost savings you anticipate from the cloud doesn’t come free. It requires planning your cloud properly, monitoring usage, and taking steps to manage and prevent unnecessary, excess costs. Be aware of these sources of potentially high costs so you can get cloud expenditures under control.
- Complex bills. Not reviewing your cloud bill in detail every month is like throwing money away. You can’t control costs if you don’t understand where your spending is going. But cloud bills are complicated, with potentially thousands of individual line items each priced differently. Nevertheless, it’s important to read through the bill to identify ways you can reduce costs.
- Unneeded resources and services. It’s easy to bring cloud resources online to support demand spikes or provide a development and testing environment and then forget to shut them down when they’re no longer needed; both unused instances and unattached storage have costs. The opposite behavior also increases costs: you may also find it hard to break the on premises habit of sizing instances for anticipated growth, instead of actual current demand, which results in instances that are oversized and over budget for your needs.
- Costs of multiple clouds. Business resilience and other strategies can result in your using multiple cloud providers. While this can be a legitimate solution, it should be limited to those applications that truly require that level of service. Not only do you have to pay for the resources with each cloud provider, you have additional costs due to more complex management and data synchronization.
- Unable to take advantage of cloud completely due to missing skills. Cloud is still new to most technologists, so your team has some learning and adjusting to do. There’ll likely be some fumbling and a few missteps that can cost some money before you’re able to take full advantage of a cloud environment.
- Not taking advantage of pricing discounts. If you know you’ll have steady, stable need for cloud services, you can use reserved instances at a lower cost than on demand instances. You should also keep an eye out for pricing changes that can make it worthwhile to switch your usage around: sometimes newer instance types are less expensive than older ones, and one geographic region may be priced lower than another.
- Departmental cloud usage. Because cloud is so easy to set up, it’s common for departments to set up their own cloud environments. Unless you limit who has the ability to request and authorize cloud services, you can lose control over cloud usage. At the same time, you don’t want to place impediments to cloud usage that keep you from taking advantage of cloud’s agility—you need to find the right balance.
Managed Amazon Web Services from dcVAST help you make sure you’re using AWS efficiently, effectively, and getting the return on investment you expect. Our team helps you establish your AWS infrastructure, monitors it to make sure it’s running smoothly, and proactively makes changes to adjust your infrastructure to your changing needs. Contact us to learn how managed AWS from dcVAST can help you keep your cloud under control.
