15 Cloud Cost Optimization Strategies

‍As organizations across all sectors increasingly adopt cloud computing for its undeniable benefits, the accompanying surge in reliance also brings forth a critical concern: escalating cloud costs. Without proactive measures, managing these expenses can pose a persistent challenge. 

Recognizing the imperative need for comprehensive strategies tailored to cloud cost optimization, we've curated a collection of practical approaches. By implementing these strategies, your organization can gain deeper visibility into its cloud environment, strategically aligning costs with performance objectives. 

Join us as we explore essential strategies for optimizing your businesses' cloud expenditures, empowering them to control cloud costs without compromising operational efficiency.

Cloud cost optimization empowers organizations to manage and reduce expenses associated with cloud computing resources effectively, all while maintaining or improving performance and functionality. This control over costs is a significant benefit of cloud cost optimization.

As more organizations transition to the cloud, its scalability and flexibility introduce the challenge of escalating costs. Cloud cost optimization aims to tackle this challenge by implementing methods and approaches to optimize the utilization of cloud resources and mitigate unnecessary expenditures.

Cloud cost optimization is an ongoing process that requires continual vigilance, analysis, and adjustment. As demands and workloads evolve, so do our strategies for optimizing cloud expenses. This continuous effort is key to maintaining optimal performance and cost-effectiveness.

By adopting a proactive approach to cloud cost optimization, companies can efficiently manage their spending, optimize resource allocation, and ensure that their cloud investments deliver optimal performance and cost-effectiveness. This proactive stance provides reassurance in the face of evolving demands and workloads.

Cloud Cost Optimization Strategies

This marks the third installment in our series on cloud cost optimization, following our exploration of essential tips and best practices in previous blogs. 

1. Identify Idle/Unused & Overprovisioned Storage Resources

Identifying idle or overprovisioned resources in the cloud is crucial for various reasons:

• Cost Optimization: Unused or idle resources result in unnecessary costs for the organization. By identifying and removing them, cloud spending can be optimized, ensuring resources are utilized efficiently and cost-effectively.
• Resource Efficiency: Overprovisioned resources consume more than required, leading to wasted capacity. Identifying and adjusting these resources ensures optimal resource utilization, enhancing overall efficiency.
• Performance Optimization: Overprovisioned resources may not always improve performance. By identifying and reallocating resources appropriately, organizations can ensure the smooth operation of applications and services without unnecessary resource allocation.

You will find several techniques and organizations with tools and solutions to help you identify idle/unused and overprovisioned compute resources. However, there is a shortage of organizations targeting storage resource optimization. This practice costs organizations a lot of money. 

You don't have to believe us; we have statistics to prove what we say. 

A study by Virtana titled "State of Hybrid Cloud Storage in January 2023" revealed that storage plays a crucial role in driving up cloud costs. A staggering 94% of respondents reported a significant increase in their cloud storage expenses, with 54% stating that their storage-related costs were growing faster than their overall cloud bill.

To gain a deeper understanding of the impact of storage on cloud expenditures, we conducted an independent study involving more than 100 enterprises utilizing cloud services from providers such as AWS, Azure, and GCP. Our research revealed that, on average, 

• Approximately 40% of cloud expenses were attributable to storage-related expenses.
• In particular, block storage services such as AWS EBS, Azure Managed Disk, and GCP Persistent Disks were identified as key drivers of overall cloud costs. 
• The disk utilization for block storage was significantly low across root volumes, application disks, and self-hosted databases.

Organizations often overprovision storage resources instead of optimizing them. Considering the rationale behind this decision is important, as optimizing storage requires significant time and effort. This process includes selecting the appropriate storage class, establishing data lifecycle management policies, and continuously monitoring and adjusting storage to meet specific requirements.

• Time consuming and resource intensive: To effectively support application needs, DevOps teams must evaluate their current storage needs, analyze data access patterns, and align storage resources accordingly. 

Thoughtful planning and consistent maintenance are key to implementing cost-effective storage solutions, managing data redundancy, and ensuring efficient data retrieval.

Furthermore, DevOps teams need to keep abreast of the latest developments and enhancements introduced by cloud providers. These advancements have the potential to improve storage efficiency through the utilization of innovative features. 

However, implementing these processes may require the DevOps team to divert time and effort from their core responsibilities, consequently impacting productivity.

• Expensive: Implementing strategies to optimize storage often requires investment in specialized tools, technologies, and expertise. Some organizations may see these upfront costs as a hurdle, mainly when operating on tight budgets or prioritizing immediate cost savings. Additionally, the cost of deploying monitoring tools across an entire cloud infrastructure can add up, leading organizations to limit their use to the production environment and reduce visibility.
• Customized tool development: The lack of comprehensive features provided by Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) necessitates the development of a bespoke solution for storage optimization. However, creating custom tools requires significant DevOps resources and time commitment.
• Challenges with CSP tools: Utilizing tools provided by Cloud Service Providers can lead to inefficiencies, lengthy processes, and high resource consumption. The cumbersome nature of these tasks makes daily execution impractical, requiring organizations to allocate excessive storage resources to ensure smooth application operation and support ongoing business activities.
• Lack of live shrinkage in CSP tools: While major CSPs offer easy scalability of storage resources, there is no straightforward method for live shrinking EBS volumes/Managed Disks/Persistent Disks. The workaround involves complex manual steps such as stopping instances, taking snapshots, and mounting new volumes, posing a risk of errors and misconfigurations.

This excessive allocation of resources in cloud environments can result in inefficiencies and increased costs due to paying for unused resources. It is imperative to address this hidden expense by implementing cloud cost automation for storage resources as a viable solution.

Lucidity has come up with just the right solution with Lucidity Storage Audit.

You can manually discover or use a monitoring tool to identify idle/unused and overprovisioned resources. However, monitoring and manual discovery tools are often limited by the demanding tasks inherent to the DevOps process or the associated implementation expenses. Managing these tools in a constantly evolving storage system environment can rapidly grow challenging and intricate.

Furthermore, investing in an additional monitoring tool would represent a significant financial commitment. These tools, which rely on agents, come with the drawback of requiring time-consuming installation, increased complexity, and greater resource demands. This can burden an already-existing system and make monitoring a cumbersome task.

In contrast, the Lucidity Storage Audit offers a seamless solution with its free and agentless approach. Through automation, this tool simplifies the optimization process and is easily accessible to users. Since it operates without agents, there is no need for additional software installation to identify idle or overprovisioned resources during an audit. This tool streamlines the comprehension of disk health and usage, facilitating more effective resource allocation and minimizing the risk of downtime.

By utilizing Lucidity Storage Audit, you are provided with the following insights:

• Comprehensive disk expenditure optimization: Learn about your current disk usage expenses and explore strategies to reduce costs by up to 70%.
• Disk utilization analysis: Identify areas of resource wastage, such as overprovisioned and idle storage volumes, and receive recommendations on enhancing resource utilization efficiency.
• Mitigation of disk downtime risks: Identify potential downtime risks to minimize financial and reputational impacts.

Key Features of Lucidity Storage Audit:

• Storage data gathering: Using the CSP's internal service, Lucidity Audit efficiently gathers essential storage metadata, including storage usage percentage and disk size.
• Security: The tool prioritizes security by prohibiting customer access to Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and sensitive data.
• No impact on performance: Lucidity Audit ensures that the auditing process does not disrupt the customer's cloud environment or resources, guaranteeing zero impact on ongoing operations.
• Resource identification: Identify idle or underutilized resources and confidently take action, such as deletion, to optimize storage. If resources are overprovisioned, easily adjust them according to your specific requirements.

2. Auto-Scale Block Storage

In cloud computing, auto-scaling refers to a system's ability to automatically adjust its resources, such as computing power or storage, based on the current workload or demand.

Unlike the traditional approach to auto-scaling, which leads to underprovisioning or overprovisioning, Lucidity automates shrinkage and expansion of storage resources. 

It is a cutting-edge solution that revolutionizes storage orchestration by automating the scaling process of storage resources. This innovative tool adapts seamlessly to changing requirements, efficiently managing overprovisioned and unused storage resources. 

The Lucidity Block Storage Auto-Scaler effortlessly adjusts block storage capacity based on changing requirements. This feature-rich tool offers:

• Effortless deployment: Onboard the Lucidity Block Storage Auto-Scaler in just three clicks to revolutionize your storage management process.
• Storage optimization: Instantly increase storage capacity and maintain a 70-80% utilization rate for optimal efficiency and cost savings.
• Highly responsive: Quickly respond to traffic or workload spikes by expanding or shrinking storage capacity within minutes, ensuring seamless operations during demand fluctuations.
• Efficient performance: The highly optimized Lucidity agent consumes less than 2% CPU and RAM usage, minimizing the impact on instance resources.

Lucidity's Block Storage Auto-Scaler offers the following benefits:

• Efficient automated disk scaling: Lucidity Auto-Scaler is designed with precision in mind. It effortlessly adjusts disk scaling with exceptional efficiency. This process is completed within 90 seconds, guaranteeing seamless coordination of large datasets.
  Including a strategic buffer mechanism in Lucidity Auto-Scaler demonstrates its meticulous design. This mechanism allows for adept management of unexpected data spikes. This forward-thinking approach maintains the block storage throughput limit, enhancing the scalability and reliability of your storage infrastructure.

• Significant storage cost savings: Lucidity Block Storage Auto-Scaler reduces storage resource expenses by 70% through automated shrinkage and expansion capabilities. Users can optimize their storage costs effectively by eliminating the need to pay for unused resources.
• Seamless scaling without downtime: Lucidity Block Storage Auto-Scaler ensures continuous operation, unlike manual provisioning processes requiring manual intervention and downtime. It effectively avoids downtime and performance lags by automatically adjusting storage resources within minutes based on demand fluctuations.

To receive customized estimates, use our ROI Calculator. Choose Azure or AWS as your cloud provider and enter your monthly or annual expenditures, disk usage, and growth rate. This will help you ascertain potential cost reductions.

• Customized policy for enhanced uptime: Lucidity provides a "Create Policy" feature that allows users to set parameters like buffer size and maximum disk utilization. This customization option ensures improved uptime reliability by automating the scaling process according to specific needs.

3. Rightsize Compute Resources

In a cloud environment, incorrect sizing of compute resources can result in various negative outcomes:

• Inefficient resource usage: Overprovisioning resources beyond what is required for the workload leads to underutilization, wasting money on resources that are not fully utilized.
• Unnecessary costs: Cloud providers usually charge based on resource usage (e.g., hourly or per GB of storage). Improperly sized resources lead to paying for more than necessary, resulting in unnecessary costs.
• Inadequate scaling: Improperly scaled resources can hinder scalability. If resources are too small, the system may struggle to handle sudden spikes in demand. Conversely, oversized resources may result in unnecessary costs for capabilities that are not consistently required.
• Capacity planning challenges: Inaccurately sized resources can complicate forecasting future capacity needs. In the long run, this may result in either over-provisioning or under-provisioning, each with its own set of issues.
• Allocation dilemmas: In multi-tenant cloud setups, improperly sized resources can create disparities in resource allocation. Some users may utilize more resources than necessary, affecting the availability and performance of resources for others.

Considering these, it is essential to size the compute resources properly. Below are three ways you can rightsize your compute resources.

Implement Rightsizing Tools

• Cloud provider tools: Several cloud providers include tools and services tailored to assist users in optimizing their computing resources. These tools analyze past usage data and suggest improvements, such as types, sizes, and configurations.
• Third-party management tools: Numerous third-party cloud management platforms and optimization tools offer advanced analytics, cost optimization features, and automation capabilities to identify and implement rightsizing opportunities throughout your cloud infrastructure.

Use Tags

• Resource tagging: Adopt a standardized approach for all cloud infrastructure resources. Categorize resources according to application, environment, department, or cost center attributes. Tags offer insights into resource usage patterns and facilitate identifying optimization opportunities tailored to your specific business needs.
• Cost allocation: Leverage tags for precise cost allocation and assignment of resource consumption to the relevant teams or projects. This detailed cost breakdown empowers stakeholders to comprehend the implications of resource utilization and promotes responsible consumption habits.

Make Rightsizing A Continuous Practice

• Automated Monitoring and Analysis: Implement automated monitoring and analysis procedures to consistently monitor resource usage metrics, performance trends, and cost patterns. This proactive approach enables timely identification of rightsizing opportunities and swift response to changes in workload demand.
• Regular reviews and optimization: Establish a schedule for regular reviews and optimization efforts to maintain rightsizing as an ongoing practice. Conduct periodic assessments of resource utilization, performance evaluations, and adjustments to resource allocations to optimize costs and performance.
• Continuous improvement culture: Promote a culture of continuous improvement by fostering collaboration among teams handling cloud management, finance, and application development. Share insights, best practices, and success stories related to rightsizing to raise awareness and encourage adoption throughout the organization.

4. Monitor And Correct Cost Anomalies

A cost anomaly indicates unforeseen or atypical fluctuations in service expenses that significantly differ from typical spending trends. Such anomalies may arise from sudden usage spikes, ineffective resource allocation, pricing model adjustments, or unforeseen events affecting workload demands.

It is crucial to promptly identify and address cost anomalies in cloud environments to prevent exceeding budgets and optimize costs.

Cloud cost management tools and services typically offer anomaly detection capabilities that analyze spending patterns, pinpoint irregularities, and suggest cost optimization and savings strategies.

In addition, setting up transparent cost monitoring and governance processes, activating budget alerts, and conducting frequent cost reviews can help minimize the effects of cost anomalies and sustain cost efficiency in the cloud.

Effective cost anomaly monitoring capabilities are essential for organizations. They go beyond standard dashboards and manual analytics, providing real-time anomaly detection. This proactive strategy allows companies to identify and resolve cost irregularities, potentially saving costs quickly.

5. Gain Visibility Into Cloud Costs

Understanding costs is vital for efficient cloud cost management as it offers valuable insights into resource utilization and potential cost-saving opportunities. Lack of visibility can result in overspending and inefficiencies in resource allocation, causing financial strain for organizations.

Through cost analysis and identifying areas for improvement, such as adjusting instance sizes, utilizing reserved instances, and optimizing storage utilization, enterprises can effectively allocate resources to enhance efficiency and reduce costs.

Furthermore, a clear understanding of expenses allows for informed decision-making. It ensures that cloud spending aligns with budgetary objectives, leading to improved financial efficiency and return on investment in cloud infrastructure management.

Many dedicated tools monitor costs accrued in real-time, such as

• You can use AWS CloudWatch for AWS cost optimization.
• For Azure cost optimization, you can rely on Microsoft Cost Management.
• For GCP cost optimization, you can try GCP Cost Management.

6. Build Cloud-Native Apps

Utilizing the inherent capabilities of cloud-native architecture promotes efficient management of cloud costs by utilizing scalability, flexibility, and efficiency features provided by cloud platforms. Cloud-native applications are intentionally designed with cloud-centric principles, including microservices architecture, serverless computing, and containerization. These methodologies allow applications to dynamically scale resources in response to demand, leading to optimal resource utilization and effective cost control.

Moreover, cloud-native applications frequently leverage managed services offered by cloud providers, decreasing the necessity for infrastructure maintenance and management. This can result in significant time and resource savings. 

Additionally, cloud-native architectures advocate automation and DevOps principles, simplifying development and deployment procedures. This reduces operational burdens and the chances of human error, ultimately driving down cloud infrastructure expenses.

7. Create Automated Alerts For Budget Overages & Anomaly Detection

Establishing automated alerts to identify budget overages and anomalies is crucial for optimizing cloud costs. This proactive monitoring approach offers real-time insight into expenditure trends. By defining thresholds and triggers, organizations can promptly detect sudden increases in usage or deviations from budget goals.

By utilizing automated alerts, teams can quickly intervene to investigate the underlying reasons for cost discrepancies and implement necessary corrections. This enables organizations to adjust resource allocations, optimize configurations, and apply cost-saving strategies promptly. Ultimately, these automated alerts empower your business to manage its budgets and prevent exceeding financial limits effectively.

In addition, ongoing monitoring and prompt notifications cultivate a culture of cost awareness in the organization, prompting stakeholders to make well-informed choices and prioritize strategies for optimizing costs. This results in more effective management of cloud expenses and enhanced financial performance.

8. Set Up & Enforce Cost Optimization

Developing and upholding a culture of cost consciousness is essential for maximizing cloud cost optimization. By promoting awareness, accountability, and responsibility throughout the organization regarding cloud spending, a cost-conscious mindset ensures that all stakeholders comprehend the impact of their actions on cloud expenses. 

By integrating cost considerations into decision-making processes, teams, from developers to executives, can make informed choices prioritizing efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

Additionally, fostering a robust culture centered around cost efficiency promotes teamwork and open communication across departments, allowing for the exchange of valuable strategies and efficient practices. 

Establishing and enforcing such a culture requires implementing various policies, training initiatives, and incentives that promote mindful spending habits and discourage frivolous actions. 

A strong emphasis on cost management cultivates a shared dedication to maximizing cloud expenditures, resulting in enhanced resource utilization, less waste, and overall improved financial outcomes for the organization.

9. Remove Shadow IT

Shadow IT involves the unauthorized use of IT systems, applications, devices, software, or services within a company without proper approval or supervision from the IT department or management. This issue commonly occurs when employees or departments acquire and implement technology solutions independently to meet their requirements, frequently circumventing official IT processes.

Shadow IT has the potential to impact cloud costs in various ways:

• Duplication of services: Different teams or individuals within an organization might independently subscribe to comparable cloud services, resulting in redundancy and unnecessary expenses.
• Underutilization: Shadow IT users may not maximize their acquired resources, leading to wasted cloud capacity and increased costs.
• Management overhead: Managing numerous, diverse cloud services introduces complexity and additional overhead to IT operations, escalating costs.
• Unpredictable spending: The lack of centralized oversight makes it difficult to anticipate and regulate cloud expenses, potentially causing budget overruns and financial surprises.
• Lack of volume discounts: Fragmented purchases across various departments or individuals may prevent you from taking advantage of discounts or advantageous pricing.

To lessen the impact of shadow IT on cloud costs, organizations should consider the following strategies:

• Employee education: Increase employees' awareness of the risks associated with shadow IT and encourage them to procure technology through official channels.
• Policy and governance implementation: Establish clear policies for IT procurement and usage and governance mechanisms to enforce compliance.
• Approved alternatives provision: Ensure that the IT department provides approved solutions that cater to the needs of different departments or functions, reducing the temptation to shadow IT.
• Usage monitoring: Utilize tools and processes to monitor cloud usage across the organization, identifying instances of shadow IT and promptly addressing them.
• Cloud resources optimization: Continuously optimize cloud resources to ensure cost-effectiveness, whether part of official IT provisioning or shadow IT initiatives.

10. Control Network & Bandwidth Costs

Network and bandwidth costs can significantly influence cloud expenses for organizations managing substantial cloud deployments or data-heavy workloads. Below are some of how network and bandwidth costs impact overall cloud costs and how to enforce your control over them.

Data transfer costs: Cloud providers frequently impose fees for transferring data between their services, such as moving data across regions, within the same region, or between the cloud and the Internet. Excessive data transfer can result in significant expenses.

How to control it? 

Improve data transfer efficiency by reducing unnecessary data movement, utilizing caching and content delivery networks (CDNs), and strategically positioning resources nearer to users or other services to minimize inter-region or inter-service data transfer.

Egress expenses in networking: Cloud providers usually impose charges for network egress, which involves transferring data from their networks to the Internet or other networks. This encompasses delivering content to users, utilizing external APIs, or sending data to on-premises systems.

How to control it?

To mitigate egress costs, apply data compression methods, enhance data formats, utilize caching and CDN services to decrease egress volume, and contemplate leveraging cloud providers' peering or content delivery services.

Networking features and services: Cloud providers offer a range of networking features and services, including load balancers, virtual private networks (VPNs), and direct interconnects. Depending on usage, these services may result in additional costs.

How to control it?

Evaluate the necessity of each networking feature or service carefully and optimize their configurations to align with actual requirements. Utilize auto-scaling features to adapt to changing network demands efficiently.

Monitoring and analysis costs: Deploying network monitoring and analysis tools in the cloud can lead to costs based on the volume of network traffic being monitored and analyzed.

How to control it?

Implement cost-effective monitoring and analysis solutions that offer essential insights without unnecessary overhead. Consider using cloud provider-native monitoring tools or third-party solutions optimized for cloud environments.

11. Check Discounts & Savings Plan

Most cloud providers offer discounts to help your businesses reduce their cloud spending, though not all workloads will be eligible. Below are three popular discount programs that may lead to substantial savings:

• Reserved instances: Consider purchasing a reserved instance when expecting extended resource usage to benefit from substantial cost savings. Reserved instances provide discounted rates for committing to specific types for one to three years. 
  Investing in a reserved instance could result in cost savings for your business if you maintain a consistent workload and do not foresee the need to adjust your resources within a specific timeframe. 
  As reserved instances often require upfront payment, it is essential for companies to carefully assess their long-term usage patterns before making any commitments. 

• Spot instances: Choosing spot instances can provide cost savings of up to 90% compared to on-demand instances, making them an attractive option for workloads that can accommodate interruptions. 
  However, it is essential to know that spot instances may be terminated when demand increases. The discounted rates for spot instances are subject to fluctuations based on availability and demand, so there is no guarantee of accessibility or acceptance of a bid.

• Volume discounts: Many cloud service providers (CSPs) offer volume discounts to larger clients with tiered pricing structures. The concept is simple: as customers use more of a service, the cost per unit decreases. 
  Some businesses use multiple cloud providers to avoid being tied to one vendor, but the opportunity for volume discounts could encourage them to consolidate certain workloads with a single provider.

12. Leverage Infrastructure Automation

Infrastructure automation involves leveraging automated processes, tools, and technologies to efficiently manage the deployment, provisioning, and configuration of infrastructure resources like servers, networks, storage, and virtual machines. This approach utilizes scripting, coding, and specialized software to streamline these tasks, minimizing the reliance on manual intervention and reducing the risk of human errors.

Infrastructure automation can help optimize cloud costs in the following manner:

• Infrastructure lifecycle management: Automation is crucial in managing the complete lifecycle of infrastructure resources, from provisioning and configuration to decommissioning. Organizations can eliminate unnecessary costs by automatically detecting and removing unused or underutilized resources.
• Continuous resource optimization: Infrastructure automation enables continuous monitoring and optimization of cloud resources. By utilizing real-time data and analytics, organizations can pinpoint opportunities for further cost savings, such as transitioning to lower-cost instance types or reserved instances.
• Integration with DevOps: Infrastructure automation seamlessly aligns with DevOps principles, allowing for smooth integration with development and deployment processes. This ensures that cost optimization strategies are integrated throughout the application lifecycle, from development to production.
• Predictive analytics in resource allocation and budgeting: Advanced automation tools can utilize predictive analytics to forecast future resource usage and costs. Organizations can make well-informed decisions to optimize resource and budget allocation by predicting demand fluctuations and cost trends.

13. Use Heat Maps

Utilizing heat maps to optimize cloud costs is a strategic approach worth considering. These visual representations offer valuable insights into fluctuations in computing demand, highlighting peak and off-peak periods. With this information, you can identify opportune moments to deactivate certain services during low-demand times without disrupting critical operations.

By pinpointing such resources and establishing schedules to activate them only when necessary, unnecessary expenditures on idle services can be minimized, ultimately reducing overall cloud expenses. For instance, a heat map may indicate the possibility of safely powering down development servers on weekends, aligning resource utilization more closely with your business requirements and financial constraints.

14. Move To A Microservice Environment

Many organizations migrate their operations to the cloud without making significant adjustments, seeing it as convenient and cost-effective. However, this approach can inadvertently transfer inefficiencies to the cloud, increasing expenses.

Transitioning from legacy applications to a microservices-based architecture can significantly impact time and costs. Organizations can eliminate inefficiencies and reduce cloud waste by strategically moving specific components to the cloud, considering resource limitations, and making incremental design changes.

15. Use Real-Time Analytics

Real-time analytics are crucial in effective cloud cost optimization by offering timely insights into resource usage, performance metrics, and spending patterns. It can enhance your cost optimization strategy in the following ways:

• Immediate visibility: Real-time analytics provide instant visibility into resource utilization, allowing organizations to swiftly identify underutilized or over-provisioned resources. This enables timely adjustments to optimize resource allocation and reduce unnecessary costs.
• Cost monitoring: Real-time analytics continuously monitor cloud spending, delivering real-time cost breakdowns and alerts for budget overruns or unexpected spikes in expenditure. This proactive approach empowers organizations to address cost overruns and prevent budget surprises promptly.
• Capacity planning: Utilizing real-time analytics facilitates predicting future resource needs by analyzing current usage trends and patterns. This allows organizations to proactively respond to spikes in demand and adjust resources accordingly, optimizing performance and avoiding unnecessary costs associated with over-provisioning.
• Cost attribution: Real-time analytics offer detailed visibility into cost influencers and usage trends among various teams, projects, and applications. This empowers organizations to allocate costs accurately, pinpoint areas of excessive spending, and implement cost-saving strategies as needed.

We hope our list of cloud cost optimization strategies will help you reduce your overall cloud cost without compromising performance or security.

As highlighted earlier, optimizing computing and storage are vital components in effectively managing cloud costs. If you've successfully optimized your computing resources but find managing storage costs challenging, contact us for a demonstration. We'll show you how automation can enhance the cost-efficiency of your cloud infrastructure.