How Cloud Costs Can Destroy Your Business

The cloud business is booming. By 2023, worldwide cloud services are expected to reap $623.3 billion. Initially, businesses implemented cloud services like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform because of their ease of use and perceived cost savings. These perceptions have led many businesses to neglect to track their cloud usage, forgetting the importance of managing and limiting their expansion of cloud services. Unchecked cloud costs triggered by demand spikes, GB data consumption, and pay-as-you-go pricing models could potentially destroy a business. What can your business do to minimize cloud costs and how can you make sure you are not unknowlingly overpaying? We answer these questions and more based on what we’ve seen in the industry so far.

Optimize to Minimize Cloud Service Usage

Cloud optimization should be at the top of every business’s list when taking steps to avoid overpaying for cloud services. Because of unused assets, unused paid-for instances, and data that is stored in a less-than-optimal space, many companies fail to make the most of their cloud services. Businesses need to assess and track their data to avoid overspending. Oversights cause eighty percent of companies to overspend anywhere from 20% to a whopping 50%, according to Gartner. For this reason, a smart, long-term cloud optimization strategy is a must.

Track with Tools and Analytics

If your company uses AWS, begin with the AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) and the AWS Cost Explorer. For Azure users, Cost Management and Billing offers a similar cost analysis. Other cloud services have various tools for monitoring and managing cloud usage. There are also third-party organizations that offer services to help you keep track of your input and output.

Set Controls

Cloud cost controls are essential to prevent overspending. Unfortunately, these tools are surprisingly underused for keeping cloud service budgets on track. Consider enabling a control that alerts you when half of your cloud service budget’s threshold has been reached for the month. If you reach that threshold toward the beginning or middle of the month, you can use this knowledge moving forward to avoid incurring high costs. Amazon CloudWatch allows you to create such an alert to notify you when potentially high-cost changes are occurring on your cloud service.

Cloud services aren’t going anywhere. For this reason, it’s important to learn how to manage and track your cloud services, so you can keep cloud service spending under control.