Many of us have heard management guru Peter Drucker’s old adage, “you can't manage what you can't measure”, a principle which certainly captures the spirit of our new whitepaper. A key theme is also encapsulated by a cloud computing survey of more than 900 IT decision makers, where IDG found a lower total cost of ownership as the primary objective behind their cloud initiatives. So, in our latest download, we ask how cloud costs in AWS and Azure might be best measured, managed, and, most importantly – lowered
How are Cloud Costs Measured?
AWS and Azure provide many tools and techniques you can use when planning your migration to the cloud and for measuring your cloud costs once you’ve migrated. Our whitepaper presents a thorough look at these tools, but here’s a taster:
- TCO calculators: Before migrating, the AWS and Azure total cost of ownership calculators enable you to compare your current on-premises operations costs to your costs for equivalent operations in the cloud. These monthly calculators let you easily estimate your planned cloud environment costs based on your identified resource needs.
- Resource tagging: To allocate costs per line of business, ad-hoc project, or even specific system tier, you can categorize your resources by adding cost allocation tags in AWS and resource tags in Azure.
- Usage monitoring: Amazon CloudWatch monitors billing and budgeting for AWS, while Azure Monitor provides this functionality for Azure. Both monitoring tools let you set up alerts that notify you in the event of high-usage spikes.
- Spend analysis: AWS offers Cost Explorer, a free tool that provides highly visual graphs of your costs, or "spend data", for up to the last 12 months. The tool also forecasts your spend for the coming month. Microsoft offers an equivalent tool in Azure Cost Management.
How are Cloud Costs Managed?
Using the above tools and techniques – as well as leveraging other features within AWS and Azure – will certainly go a reasonable way in the management of costs. However, many enterprises require deeper insights and greater control than the inbuilt tools offer – our whitepaper examines how this can be best realized.
Managing Dynamic IT
Cloud environments can consist of hundreds or even thousands of instances, each one constantly in flux as it scales based on demand. Only
Right-sizing and Allocating Costs for Resources
It’s often extremely difficult to purchase the right size of cloud resources – much like with on-premises environments, under or over-provisioning is common. We discuss how a third party tool, providing greater visibility into resource utilization, can help you make a better-informed decision.
Budgeting and Forecasting for Future Needs
Once you’ve developed a budget forecast for the cloud environment, you need to remain vigilant against resource sprawl and budget creep by consistently monitoring your accounts and forecasting the next month’s usage and invoice. This can be particularly challenging if your IT department must forecast and monitor a budget that meets the cloud needs of multiple IT departments and projects. In the download, we reveal how, in such cases, a partner solution that’s specifically built for AWS and Azure can make this task much easier.
Learn More
This post has given a small glimpse into some of the topics covered in our extensive guide. Ultimately, we look at the benefits associated with using AWS and Azure, the challenges to gaining those benefits, and how those challenges can be overcome. Once challenges have been conquered, you're able to better:
- Discover and visualize what’s running in your cloud environment
- Consolidate views across multiple cloud accounts and regions
- Understand cloud costs
- Analyze your resource usage
- Monitor for changes
- Receive recommendations for AWS RI purchase opportunities or Azure machine size changes
- Leverage hundreds of best-practice checks for security, availability, cost, and usage
- Maintain a historical record of your cloud configuration
To learn more, download the free whitepaper today.
Topics: Cloud Management Services
