As the market for cloud services for enterprises continues to grow, the amount your organisation spends on cloud services can quickly escalate. If enterprises can gain better visibility on the cost of each cloud service they utilise, they can find the right balance of the services they use, reduce operating expenses, and garner the best possible value from the cloud.Â
According to the IDC, spending on public cloud services and infrastructure is expected to reach $210 billion in 2019, which is an increase of 23.8% from 2018. By 2022, public cloud services spending should reach $370 billion, with the market forecast to achieve a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.5%.
Public clouds are popular with enterprises because they’re more cost effective and less complex to set up, allowing companies to achieve their goals more efficiently. That said, complexities often arise as cloud resources accumulate, and enterprises have little visibility of which cloud resources they’re utilising. This typically leads to a surplus of unmonitored, underused, or idle cloud resources on various platforms in multiple accounts, causing the enterprise to overspend on unnecessary resources.
Managing these underused resources and reducing the associated expenditure can be achieved by implementing a cloud performance monitoring solution that provides the following features:
1. AÂ holistic view of cloud services
Typically, enterprises only get an idea of their cloud spend when the invoices for the various cloud services they’re using land in the accounting department. This makes measuring cloud costs a complicated, time-consuming process. By implementing a platform with AI-driven monitoring, enterprises can optimise spending by holistically viewing cloud expenditures across multiple accounts from a single console. Enterprises can benefit from a solution that displays AWS expenditure broken down by various dimensions, including linked accounts, service type, region, and user-defined tags—with options to schedule them as reports.
2. Set budget controls
When cloud spend is managed retroactively by assessing invoices, the enterprise has already accumulated costs that could have been avoided using readily available technology. A cloud monitoring platform with budget control functionality helps reduce operating expenses, preventing runaway spending by capping the amount that can be spent on each public cloud service. The right monitoring platform should enable users to set up notifications to inform them when spending exceeds the established budget for each cloud service.
3. Tracking cloud spend with tagsÂ
Tags are a common way to manage workloads, and with the right cloud monitoring platform, tags can be used to track the use of cloud services, too. Tags allow enterprises to recognise which project each cloud service is being used for, which team or customer is using the cloud service, and when that service can be switched off once it is no longer utilised.
4. Security and compliance
Security and compliance must be factored into any solution, so enterprises must look for solutions fortified with self-hosted data centres, redundant  grid architectures, encryption of data in transit, strict policies and processes, and features to help with complying to regulatory standards such as ISO/IEC 27001, GDPR, and SOC 2.
By empowering teams to regulate their cloud services, enterprises can gain greater control over their cloud spend. It’s easy to accumulate cloud services; however, enabling teams to monitor their own usage will encourage them to effectively manage their own costs. Of course, other internal parties, such as the accounting department, should also monitor the cloud spend of each team or customer as well. Therefore, it’s important to invest in a solution that enables visibility of cloud spend to multiple users across the entire enterprise.
Supported by AI-driven insights, a cloud monitoring tool that provides greater visibility and control over cloud resource spending enables DevOps and IT teams to streamline and enhance the performance of their cloud resources while also eliminating runaway expenditures. Continuous monitoring of cloud environments and the ability to control spending within those environments is vital to achieving a competitive edge.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Srinivasa Raghavan is the product manager of Site24x7, a division of Zoho Corporation, and has been with the company for more than 16 years. He plays a critical role in decision making on product architecture, management, and engineering, and oversees the direction of the entire product suite. He likes programming, troubleshooting, and is a singing and sports enthusiast.