Many companies are just starting off their adoption journey into the public cloud and experiencing what Cloud Economics might be. But most of them struggle or even fail to manage the corresponding cloud cost. Most of them even did not setup a framework for cloud cost management or governance. The result is often the same. Uncontrolled growth of the monthly bill with no clue where all the cost come from.

The cloud adoption trend continues

The cloud adoption trend continues to pick up. Many who deal with the cloud, or more precisely with the public cloud have the feeling that it is already everywhere. Talk about it with your internal and external customers day in and day out pushes this feeling. Certainly, it just comes from the fact that we have been talking about the same topic repeatedly for so many years. But this perception deceives us, leads us behind the light. We are still at the very beginning of our journey to adopt the public cloud. Sure, some countries and some organizations are more advanced than others. Overall, however, we have so far only made little use of the new possibilities. And the reasons for this are just as diverse as the services and possibilities that are currently emerging here.

We are moving forward with great ambitions to hand over our data and migrate our workloads into the hands of the large global public cloud providers. And then we also start to dismantle our own private data centers or discontinue to renew it. We do this because we believe that this will save us money. We believe that our data will now be more secure. And we believe that we will benefit from innovations that these global public cloud providers can develop faster and cheaper than any organization for itself. And I tell you, this is true. But as little as the cloud adoption is evolved yet, as little is our experience about it. And this leads again to a higher set of questions to be answers an uncertainty to be eliminated.

a man holding a burning torch

I will be your torch

For more about ten years I am dealing with cloud projects of different size. And right, from the very beginning, cloud cost plays a significant role in almost every cloud project. For sure, you must not only pre-estimate the upcoming cost for a new service or the new cloud infrastructure. You also must deal with a different pricing model as it was in your private data center. So, to calculate the cost is one thing, comparing it with the legacy is the other. Luckily for me, besides Marketing, Sales and Statistics, I also studied accounting for a few semesters. This gave me a kind of a kick start in dealing with cloud cost, Cloud Economics and comparing apples with apples.

Now, I will let you participate in all my experience of cloud cost and start off this very new series in my blog. Right about Cloud Cost, Cloud Economics, FinOps and how to save money when move into the cloud. I will guide you through.

More than 30% of public cloud cost is waste

If you did not set up a governance and control mechanism, you would lose the control, if you ever had some. This lack of control leads to a wide sprawl of cloud usage in the entire company and uncontrolled increasing of the organisation’s public cloud environments. And in fact, this uncontrolled increase leads again to heavily increasing uncontrolled cloud spendings. On top of it, research has shown that up to one-third of all cloud spendings might be waste and could be easily avoided with a simple framework. The first step in the right direction is to recognize that there might be a problem and fortunately, two-thirds of those companies do and have put cloud cost optimization on their To-Do list.

Waste in terms of public cloud are resources which are not in use. To understand why this is called waste, you need to understand that resources in the public cloud are often billed per hour, per runtime, per GB, and so on. Therefore, every resource which is not in use, or oversized, is wasted money. The first key into a cost optimised environment is, to only size resources as much as it is needed and automatically scale it if you do not have a steady usage type.

What is the first step in Cloud Economics?

A few gaps in your current cloud environment can easily make
your cloud spends spiral out of control. Ask yourself:

  • Do you have complete visibility into your cloud spend?
  • Are your resources appropriately provisioned?
  • Are you using the purchasing options in the most cost-effective way?
  • Do you have the strategies, systems, and internal communications in place to connect your cloud costs with your business insights?
  • Are you using any tools to control costs across cloud platforms?
  • Is your infrastructure design adopting new cloud capabilities like PaaS and SaaS?
  • Is your application design mature enough to leverage a cloud native approach?

To answer these questions is the first step on a journey to master your cloud costs and design a cloud adoption journey with the most effective and cost optimised cloud strategy. Check out this Cloud Economics series and do not forget to subscribe to the newsletter to not miss an article. It will save you money.

This is the very first part of a series of articles related to these topics. Do not miss one by subscribing to my newsletter.

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