4 Ways Your Business Can Address Mounting Cloud Costs And Build A Cost Stable Foundation

As cloud computing continues to evolve, CIOs have been leveraging cloud data centers for the innovation potential they offer. Still, rapid cloud migration and the growing complexity of navigating usage and costs have made an impact. The ‘cloud first’ mentality of the last decade has shifted to reveal major concerns for business leaders managing higher-than-planned cloud costs.

Security concerns have long held the top priority for CIOs considering cloud data center utilization. When companies outsource control of their IT stack, data, and applications, making a move to the cloud prompts significant security considerations because it opens their environment to new attack potentials, relinquishing control to another provider.

Moving business infrastructure to the cloud involves an entirely new threat landscape and limited visibility and control over the data. It requires work to identify planning for regulatory compliance around handling sensitive data, geographic privacy mandates, addressing vulnerability and breach response plans, reviewing how security is enforced, and breaking down the layers for accountability or operational gaps – all items necessary to build a solid security foundation.

Beyond Security: The New Challenge of Cloud Computing for Businesses

Security is still a paramount concern for businesses, but the fact remains that enterprise cloud projects result in unnecessary amounts of cloud investment cash going down the drain. Cloud cost management has surpassed security as a top concern for IT decision-makers.

Flexera’s 2023 State of the Cloud report reveals the struggles organizations are experiencing. A whopping 82% of businesses surveyed indicated that their top cloud challenge is the difficulty controlling cloud costs. These businesses highlight the lack of visibility into cloud usage as the main reason for cloud waste, and IDC firms agree that organizations are wasting up to 30% of their cloud spend.

This pain point has even prompted organizations to develop FinOps frameworks to remedy the growing need in recent years. FinOps delivers teams dedicated to controlling cloud spend and managing infrastructure investments to balance their IT transformations.

Macroeconomic uncertainty and tighter business budgets make it clear that optimization for computing is a critical trend that cannot be ignored. Efforts to control excessive cloud spend and reduce waste becomes even more urgent in a challenging economy. Organizations must discover how to right-size their cloud footprints and achieve cost savings over all their data, in and out of the cloud.

Tackling Cloud Costs: The Urgent Need for Optimization

Cloud over-spending is causing organizations to re-evaluate their strategies and providers, but it is unlikely to completely stop cloud computing. Businesses are expanding digital footprints, and outsourcing IT infrastructure provides specialized expertise and numerous benefits, including flexibility, scalability, and agility, that organizations highly value. In addition, the increasing complexity and volume of data and the need to support digital transformation initiatives mean that many organizations must leverage cloud and colocation computing. However, organizations can take steps to optimize their cloud costs and avoid overspending.

Here are a few ways to make this happen for your company.

1. Optimize Cloud Usage

   Businesses can optimize their cloud usage with regular assessments to identify cloud-dependent workflows and ascertain which of these functions are vital to the business operations and which may require resizing or relocation to a more stable cost model.

   By regularly reviewing their cloud usage patterns and rightsizing their cloud resources based on their actual usage, businesses can eliminate unnecessary costs and only pay for the needed resources.

2. Adopt A Hybrid Platform Strategy

   Businesses cannot innovate in a digital world without data center services. Adopting a hybrid platform strategy enables companies to choose the best cloud providers in a multi-cloud approach. As the leading providers battle for superiority, businesses can use the competitive marketplace as their advantage.

   Organizations leveraging IT infrastructure across hybrid platforms are better positioned to capitalize on workload placement that matches their bottom lines. These organizations achieve greater flexibility and agility to scale computing for temporary workloads, leverage SaaS solutions, and secure dynamic computing in more affordable colocation data centers, retaining IT independence and cost stabilization. Finding this balance enables CIOs to focus on keeping the business operational while realizing a cost model that accommodates all aspects of their business needs.

3. Retain Owned Resources In Colocation For Core IT

   Colocation data centers provide businesses with affordable and secure data center infrastructure to host their steady-state and core applications. This helps companies save on capital expenses associated with building and maintaining their data centers. Sensitive, steady-state, and core applications hosted securely and affordably in colocation data centers offer predictable utility-based pricing and complete visibility.

   Managing a data center and having staff dedicated to equipment maintenance, management, and modernization is a considerable capital expense that can strain budgets and resources. Outsourcing infrastructure to colocation data centers can allow CIOs to focus on keeping the business operational, stable, and agile while realizing a cost model that accommodates all aspects of their business needs.

4. Implement FinOps Frameworks

   FinOps is a set of practices and principles that help organizations manage their cloud costs effectively and define where overspending resides. By implementing a FinOps framework, businesses can create a culture of cost optimization and ensure that their cloud spending aligns with their overall business goals.

   Cloud cost management can often be spread across several teams in an organization, with less responsibility for expenses happening year over year. Shifting the responsibility to FinOps gives a dedicated focus on identifying areas of improvement, strengthening their organizations with improved cloud forecasting, right-scaling which applications are the best match, and better tagging of cloud resources.