Cloud Management Platforms help Managed Service Providers optimize customer cloud spend.
Cloud Management Platforms Make Cost Optimization a Snap
With the rapid growth in cloud adoption over the past decade, effectively managing cloud costs has become a top priority for organizations. Cloud management platforms provide a comprehensive set of tools to optimize cloud spending and maximize value.
Visibility into Usage and Spend
The first step towards optimizing cloud costs is getting visibility into usage and spend across cloud environments. Cloud management platforms provide a centralized dashboard to monitor utilization and costs across multiple cloud accounts and subscriptions. Advanced analytics give insights into spending patterns and cost allocation at various levels—by service, resource type, team or application. This granular visibility enables organizations to identify waste and opportunities to optimize. Automated reporting can highlight cost variances or overruns to facilitate quick correction.
Budgeting and Cost Monitoring
Setting budgets is an important aspect of cost governance. Cloud management platforms allow setting budgets at multiple levels—overall account, department, or resource level. Advanced platforms provide budget alerts and notifications when spending exceeds defined thresholds. Some also support budget forecasting based on historic usage to assist planning. Detailed cost monitoring against set budgets ensures organizations stay within budget guardrails.
Usage Analytics and Rightsizing
Usage analytics help identify overprovisioned or idle resources which can then be right sized or shut down. Cloud management platforms analyze usage patterns of compute, storage and other resources over time to provide actionable recommendations for optimizing infrastructure and reducing waste. The platforms use machine learning algorithms to forecast future capacity requirements for different applications, enabling optimized provisioning.
Automating Cost Optimization
Manual optimization of cloud resources can be challenging at scale. Cloud management platforms provide automation capabilities to implement cost optimization recommendations. For example, they can automate shutting down or resizing overprovisioned cloud instances outside business hours or during periods of low utilization. Platforms also allow setting schedules for resources like test/dev environments that need to run only during certain hours. Automating optimization maximizes savings while minimizing risk and efforts.
Cross-cloud Cost Management
As multi-cloud adoption increases, getting a unified view across cloud environments becomes critical. Cloud management platforms provide consolidated cost tracking, optimization and governance across multi-vendor hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Organizations gain a single pane of glass for managing cost, usage and performance across cloud stacks, avoiding cost overruns.
With comprehensive visibility, analysis, automation and governance capabilities for multi-cloud environments, cloud management platforms are invaluable tools for optimizing cloud costs. The use of these platforms by finance and technology teams is key for organizations to maximize cloud value and align spending with strategic priorities.
