The multi-cloud is a complex environment. It features disparate providers and terms of service. For this reason, it’s easy for costs to run amok. This is why cloud cost management is so important. Organizations should make it a priority from the word go. At the same time, compromising on critical features, such as monitoring, security, and management, can be problematic. The good news is, there are some reasonable measures you can take to make the most of a multi-cloud investment.
1. Conduct Proper Research
Proper research is key to multi-cloud cost management. Evaluate the needs of the organization against what providers are offering. Understand workload demand patterns so you can attribute costs across providers and leverage on-demand services more effectively. Establish what capabilities you’ll need (third-party services and tools) to accommodate these workloads.
2. Have a Strategy
Put in place a cost management plan. After you’ve evaluated all the options available, pick one with a cloud-native architecture suited for your organization’s workload. Assess your on-premise workloads one by one. Prioritize and move the workloads that are going to yield the biggest benefit for the organization to the cloud.
3. Evaluate the Business Needs
Organizations usually deploy application components to several cloud environments depending on business requirements. However, this approach can lead to escalated costs when you ignore the larger, real-world implications. You need to consider application workflows and relationships, along with business needs, to reduce the movement of data across cloud boundaries.
4. Constant Monitoring
Continuously monitor infrastructure usage. This is the best way to ensure resources and money don’t go to waste in a multi-cloud environment. Public cloud platforms allow organizations to ramp up or ramp down resources depending on demand. But organizations can only realize a cost-benefit if they manage utilization effectively.
5. Proper Data Tiering and Classification
Tiering and classification of data is key to managing costs in the multi-cloud. When organizations skip this step, they might have to contend with costly data transfers. This is because data have to move from one platform to another.
Instead of having data replicated across cloud platforms, organizations should segregate it across multi-cloud platforms to serve local systems and applications.
6. Cost Management Is A Long-Term Investment
Managing costs in a multi-cloud environment is a continuous, ongoing process. Taking it as a one-off activity is a recipe for failure. The best course of action is to align cloud costs to the key performance indicators of the business.
7. Have Strong Management
The multi-cloud gives organizations a lot of flexibility in the deployment and support of mission-critical applications. But left unchecked, the costs of a multi-cloud environment can spiral out of control. Many organizations struggle with the management of hidden costs associated with data migration, compute, and storage. Strong management can help organizations to deploy cloud resources in a manner that best suits the business needs.
8. Never Skimp on Security
One mistake that organizations make is to assume that the cloud provider is responsible for the security of their data. It is the responsibility of organizations to implement adequate security measures to safeguard their data and other assets.
