Optimizing cloud spend is a priority for organizations of all sizes. Without proactive management, on-demand resources can unexpectedly 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.
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.
✔ Make It Collaborative: Grant dashboard access to cross-functional teams, ensuring finance and IT teams can align on spending.
✔ Use Allocation Tags: Tag resources by project, department, or client to easily track where money is going.
✔ Automate Reporting: Schedule cost reports so stakeholders get regular updates on spending trends before they become a problem.
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.
✔ 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.
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.
✔ 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 services for testing, prototyping, or light workloads to reduce costs.
Oversized virtual machines (VMs) and forgotten development servers can dramatically inflate bills. Regularly adjusting compute resources to match actual usage is one of the fastest ways to reduce cloud costs.
✔ 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 instances that often get spun up and forgotten.
Cloud storage costs can spiral if everything is kept in the most expensive tier. With a strategic approach, businesses can cut costs while still meeting compliance and performance requirements.
✔ 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 data based on usage patterns.
✔ Mind Transfer Costs: Data ingress/egress fees can add up—factor these into your cloud budget, especially in hybrid environments.
✔ 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.
For more detailed guidance on optimizing cloud costs—or to see how Access Point Consulting can support your cloud strategy, contact us.
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