ShareGate is a Canadian organisation that helps clients simplify their move to the cloud. A recent post on their blog revealed that in 2017 the business had actually struggled to keep their cloud costs down. Despite being an organisation made up of cloud experts, they were struggling to manage cloud sprawl and to control their cloud-related resources. And if managing cloud costs is tough for a company in the cloud business, it’s understandable that those who aren’t cloud savvy will have some trouble too.

As more and more companies move to the cloud, now is the perfect time to consider how you’re going to monitor all the costs associated with your migration. Here’s our advice for keeping your cloud expenses in check.

#1 Identify unused and idle resources

One of the easiest ways to optimise your cloud costs is to identify any unused resources. It’s not uncommon for administrators or developers to just “spin up” a temporary server to perform a function and then forget to turn it off when they’re done. In line with this, the same administrators are also known to forget to remove storage relating to instances they’ve terminated. With the right cloud expense management strategy in place, it’s possible to consolidate computing jobs user fewer cloud instances. As part of this process, be sure to analyse computing services and modify them to the most efficient size.

#2 Multi-cloud vs single cloud

According to IDC more than 85% of enterprise IT organisations committed to multi-cloud architectures by 2018. This is because the benefits of multi-cloud environments speak for themselves – cost savings, greater reliability, avoiding vendor lock-in, performance optimisation and lowered risk of cyber attacks. But in using multiple cloud vendors, you may be missing out on the potential volume discounts you could receive by working with a single cloud vendor.

Having an effective cloud expense management solution in place makes it possible for businesses to leverage the benefits of cloud, without the risks of overspending. Need help optimising your organisation’s cloud costs? We’re here to help.