Cloud adoption has matured, but cloud efficiency still lags behind. Even seasoned organizations face the same problem: costs that climb faster than expected. The cloud promises flexibility, yet without oversight, that flexibility can quietly erode budgets.
In a recent Access Point Consulting webinar, CIO Anthony Rivera and Director of Infrastructure Services Kevin Hartwig shared strategies for controlling and optimizing cloud spend—approaches refined through years of hands-on work with clients across regulated industries. Below are their key insights.
Real-time visibility is the foundation of good governance. A well-designed cloud cost dashboard enables IT, finance, and leadership to see the same data—usage, trends, and anomalies—in one view.
Anthony & Kevin recommend:
✔ Make It Collaborative: Give finance and operations equal access to cost data for shared accountability.
✔ Use Allocation Tags: Label workloads by project or department to pinpoint spending.
✔ Automate Reports: Deliver scheduled summaries to stakeholders before issues escalate.
Even with careful forecasting, cloud charges can surge. Budget alerts give teams an early warning before overruns occur, so small deviations never become surprises.
Anthony & Kevin suggest:
✔ Tier Your Alerts: Trigger notifications at 80%, 90%, and 100% of budget thresholds.
✔ Limit Non-Production Waste: Apply alarms or automatic shutdowns in dev/test environments to curb idle costs.
Cloud flexibility doesn’t mean every workload needs to be on-demand. The right payment model can yield meaningful savings.
Anthony & Kevin’s top choices:
✔ Reserved Instances: Lower rates in exchange for commitment on predictable usage.
✔ Savings Plans: Spend commitments that apply across multiple services for broader discounts.
✔ Spot Instances: Deeply discounted options for batch or non-critical tasks.
✔ Free Tiers: Great for testing or pilot environments where uptime isn’t critical.
Right-sizing remains one of the simplest—and most overlooked—ways to cut waste. Overprovisioned virtual machines and idle resources quietly inflate monthly costs.
Anthony & Kevin advise:
✔ Track Utilization: Monitor CPU, memory, and storage to flag over-provisioned assets.
✔ Enable Auto Scaling: Let workloads expand or contract automatically.
✔ Clean Up Regularly: Decommission old dev/test instances before they become “ghost spend.”
Not all data deserves the same shelf space—or cost. Intelligent tiering can reduce storage expenses without compromising compliance or access.
Anthony & Kevin recommend:
✔ Match Access Frequency to Tier: Keep active data in “hot” storage and archive infrequently accessed data in lower-cost tiers.
✔ Automate Movement: Use provider tools that auto-tier based on usage patterns.
✔ Plan for Egress Fees: Account for data transfer costs, especially across hybrid environments.
✔ Transparency First: Dashboards and alerts bring spending into focus.
✔ Plan for Predictability: Commit to capacity where workloads are steady; stay flexible elsewhere.
✔ Iterate and Improve: Regular optimization prevents waste from creeping back in.
✔ Collaborate Across Teams: True cloud efficiency happens when IT, finance, and business leaders share ownership of cost outcomes.
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