5 quick-win cloud cost optimisation opportunities
FinOps: it’s what you’re aiming for, and you’re doing your darndest to make it happen. You know there’s lots of savings potential, and you’re making progress.
But wouldn’t it be nice if that progress happened a bit faster (and with less annoying admin)?
These 5 quick wins will help supercharge your savings and take the headache out of cost optimisation.
Quick win #1: Automate cost allocation
FinOps is meant to be your accelerator for cloud savings. But you can’t save costs if you can’t allocate them accurately or efficiently.
We have cloud management tooling that gives you 100% automation for showbacks and chargebacks. Our mantra is: “Applications are your unit of management”, so everything is allocated based on applications. You just set the rules and distribution keys, and costs are automatically allocated to the right customer, cost centre, business unit or person.
The result: you save hours of costly and annoying admin.
Your guide to cloud cost allocation
This guide gives you a systematic way to get to know your organisation’s cloud spend.
Quick win #2: Get rid of orphaned and unused resources
With the cloud, it’s so easy to create resources and so easy to forget about them. So the organisation has all these resources no one’s using – but you’re still paying for them (even if they’re turned off). Therefore, there are substantial savings to be had if you can find where they are and get rid of them.
Tooling makes it easy to map resources against the business – and see exactly what’s orphaned, underutilised and unused. And you may be surprised at how much is out there. Our customers routinely cut their capacity costs by 25% with these savings suggestions.
Quick win #3: Automate reservations
In theory, reservations should be saving you money. But you only get those savings if the process is efficient and you’re buying reservations for the right things.
With cloud management tooling, you can automate the annoying manual work around reservations. You get a dashboard with reservation recommendations across your clouds. You can easily see whether you actually have the VMs you have reservations for. And you can track how reservations are being used, so you can make more informed cost optimisation decisions.
Quick win #4: Get engineers to act on savings suggestions
39% of FinOps teams say getting engineers to take action is their biggest challenge. There’s only so many times you can remind people to change servers, get rid of unused resources or stop overprovisioning. Plus, all that reminding takes time (and time is money, too).
Tooling also cuts the cost of inaction. There’s no need for anyone to compile or read cost optimisation reports. Engineers get personalised dashboards that automatically tell them where savings opportunities are. So in a few clicks, they can right-size and optimise in a targeted way. They’ve sorted it in minutes, and you get the satisfaction of seeing the savings roll in.
Quick win #5: Stop overspend before it becomes a problem
Cost optimisation isn’t just about fixing current problems, it’s also about pre-empting issues before they balloon into expensive muddles. But accurately forecasting cloud consumption can be tricky because of the pay-as-you-go/opex-driven model.
helps you keep control of costs. You get accurate forecasts across all your clouds, so there’s no more guesswork. Dashboards make it easy to track spend month to month and against forecasts. And you’re even notified if consumption is increasing faster than expected, so you can nip unnecessary overspend in the bud.
Your guide to cloud budgeting & forecasting
Is your current cloud spend crystal clear? How about your future spend?
This guide talks you through the most important aspects of cloud cost budgeting and forecasting.
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