After completing the form, the system will prompt you to select a meeting time.
On our first call, we will determine whether and how we can help. From there, we discuss your current state under the protection of a non-disclosure agreement and craft a tailored plan to move you and your company forward. Last, we carry out that plan together in a way that saves you time, money, and stress.
Anthony Rivera and Kevin Hartwig, Access Point Consulting
Optimizing cloud spend is a priority for organizations of all sizes. Without proactive management, on-demand resources canunexpectedly inflate monthly bills, leading to unnecessary expenses.
In a recent webinar, Access Point’s CIO Anthony Rivera and Director of Infrastructure Services Kevin Hartwig, shared their expertise on practical ways to control and reduce cloud costs. In this article, we share some of their insights.
1. Monitor Costs with Cloud Dashboards
A well-structured cloud cost dashboard provides real-time visibility into spending across various resources, accounts, or departments. When IT, finance, and leadership have access to a shared view of usage and costs, decision-making improves, and wastefulness decreases.
Best Practices from Anthony & Kevin
✔ Make It Collaborative: Grant dashboard access to cross-functional teams, ensuring finance and IT teams can align on spending. ✔ Use Allocation Tags: Tag resources byproject, department, or clientto easily track where money is going. ✔ Automate Reporting: Schedule cost reports so stakeholders get regular updates on spending trends before they become a problem.
2. Set Budget Alarms
Even with careful planning, cloud costs can spike unexpectedly. Budget alarms alert teams when spending approaches a predefined limit, allowing for quick investigation and correction before charges get out of hand.
Best Practices from Anthony & Kevin
✔ Create Tiered Alerts: Set multiple alarms (e.g., 80%, 90%, 100% of budget) so teams can act before exceeding limits. ✔ Limit Non-Production Spend: In development or QA environments, configure alarms—or automated shutdowns—to prevent runaway costs from idle resources.
3. Leverage Alternative Payment Models
Most cloud providers offer cost-saving alternatives beyond standard pay-as-you-go pricing. Leveraging the right model can lead to substantial cost reductions for predictable workloads.
Key Options from Anthony & Kevin
✔ Reserved Instances: Pre-purchase compute capacity at a discount if workloads are predictable. ✔ Savings Plans: Commit to a certain level of spend (e.g., $X per year) for discounts across different services. ✔ Spot Instances: Ideal for non-critical or batch workloads, offering deep discounts in exchange for flexible uptime. ✔ Free Tiers: Take advantage of free-tier servicesfortesting, prototyping, or light workloadsto reduce costs.
4. Right-Size Your Instances
Oversized virtual machines (VMs) and forgotten development serverscandramatically inflate bills. Regularly adjusting compute resources to match actual usage is one of the fastest ways to reduce cloud costs.
Best Practices from Anthony & Kevin
✔ Monitor Workloads: Continuously track CPU, memory, and storage usage to identify over-provisioned resources. ✔ Use Auto Scaling: Scale horizontally or vertically based on real-time demand—pay for what you need, when you need it. ✔ Terminate Idle Resources: Implement automated shutdown policies for development and test instancesthat often get spun up and forgotten.
5. Plan Your Data Tiering Strategically
Cloud storage costscan spiral ifeverything is kept in the most expensive tier. With a strategic approach, businesses cancut costs while still meeting compliance and performance requirements.
Key Considerations from Anthony & Kevin
✔ Match Usage to Tier: Store frequently accessed data in hot storage, while older or less-used data moves to warm or cold tiers for lower costs. ✔ Automate Tiering: Many cloud providers offer intelligent tiering that automatically moves databased on usage patterns. ✔ Mind Transfer Costs:Data ingress/egress fees can add up—factor these into your cloud budget, especially in hybrid environments.
Final Takeaways from Anthony & Kevin
✔ Visibility is Key: Set up dashboards and budget alarms so spending remains transparent. ✔ Preemptive Planning Pays Off: Reserve capacity for steady workloads and leverage spot instances where flexibility allows. ✔ Optimize Continuously: Regularly review instance usage, storage strategy, and automation opportunities to cut unnecessary costs. ✔ Make It a Team Effort: Cloud cost management isn’t just IT’s job—finance and leadership must collaborate to ensure cloud spend aligns with business value.
Want to Learn More?
For more detailed guidance on optimizing cloud costs—or to see how Access Point Consulting can support your cloud strategy, contact us.
When a cyber incident strikes, most business owners worry: “What do I do now?” Access Point CIO Anthony Rivera and Couch Braunsdorf Insurance Group CIO Eric Wistrand explore how cyber liability insurance can help fill the gap between technical readiness and financial recovery. Following are key takeaways from the recording— and the reasons why this topic deserves a closer look for small and mid-sized organizations.
Sloppy security practices in the workplace can undermine a company’s investments in tools and technology. Even the most advanced firewalls, intrusion detection systems, or encryption protocols cannot compensate for employees who are unaware of risks or uninformed about best practices.
In our recent webinar, “The Role of the Virtual CISO,” Susan Woyton and Michael Caruso explained how organizations can benefit from strategic security leadership without hiring a full-time executive. Their discussion touched on the growing demand for vCISO services, the range of responsibilities a vCISO covers, and how Access Point tailors each engagement to client needs.
To build on that conversation, here are five reasons more organizations are turning to Virtual CISOs.
