Do you have 100% confidence where your Azure costs will be tomorrow, 3 months from now, or next year?
Are you positive if you implemented new cost control measures today that they would be the relevant measures for tomorrow? In this blog, Eastwall shares a bit of insight in how we evaluate cost control for the future.
Talk about a weekly allowance…
Would you give an engineer or architect a $1MM annual budget to spend, and then when asked to audit the purchases have nothing to see except a confusing CSV report? How about $500,000? $250,000?
Not having the appropriate tooling, insights & analytics to your cloud spend is the exact situation just described. Yet, with many organizations who have recently adopted cloud, the management & oversight of cloud assets typically comes down to the most savvy engineer, not an executive who owns budgets & planning.
You wouldn't allow this level of oversight in the Finance department. Why would you in IT or operations?
Cost management means smart spending
We often looking at big-ticket items on the bill to find out where all our money has gone. Sometimes this is the right approach, but often we are missing the underlying problem - how did those big ticket items get so big? Who authorized that purchase? Was that purchase really necessary to accomplish our business need?
Many times, we’re stepping over dollars to pick up pennies. Those smaller costs are going to grow and can add up quickly. Rather than chasing the biggest items on the a monthly cloud invoice, we should pause - reflect on our spending habits, and stop stepping over dollars to pick up the pennies. The root cause of cloud sprawl and growth must be addressed:
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Get visibility, take control. Put in place proper governance, cost alerting & budgeting controls using a tools-based approach (Azure native, or third-party).
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Tune for today. Evaluate SKU selection & sizing of high-cost resources to resize and optimize where appropriate, leveraging data/analytics from your tools to make guided decisions.
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Prepare for tomorrow. Determine future growth patterns, trends and use-cases within your business. Identify where cost measures can be implemented without impacting application performance, security or employee productivity. Build these measures into your central governance plan & as part of project implementation down the road.
Eastwall has seen organizations save upwards of 45%+ on their total monthly Azure spend by taking a methodical approach to the steps above. Layer in the appropriate visualizations - for example, customer-segmented product COGS dashboards for your finance or product teams - and you’ll start to identify outliers and nuances of how your cloud sprawl is growing.
Differentiate with dollars
There are dozens of cost-management, insight and reporting tools in the Microsoft Azure ecosystem. Native tooling provides basic functionality out of the box but is not tailored to your specific business. Choosing the right toolset is important, but determining where to start chipping away at a growing Azure invoice can be a daunting task. Working with a trusted partner is key. Eastwall has worked with hundreds of organizations to evaluate current & future growth patterns, optimize existing cloud footprints & build out governance & ongoing cost visuals that help you understand cloud finance. We help design, build, and operate innovative cloud solutions on the Azure platform. Please contact us for a free consultation on how various Azure cloud services can help transform your business. Eastwall has a proven Cost Optimization methodology that can help your business optimize the next cloud deployment.