Save on cloud spending: Five essential AWS cost management strategies that work

Digital transformation can be a rewarding endeavor for any enterprise, especially now considering the current remote work scenario. Often, organizations leverage the support of the cloud to set up robust digital transformation frameworks.

The cloud offers scalability, and is far more dynamic in terms of consumption—you pay for what you use. Despite the cost and labor effectiveness of cloud architecture, businesses often find themselves facing new cost management challenges. 

When operations teams make decisions daily that affect the cost and size of your cloud architecture, keeping tabs on your cloud costs can become taxing. Few organizations still manually track their cloud costs via spreadsheets, and those organizations that do only find this task grows more challenging as the cloud infrastructure grows.

According to the IDC Multicloud Management Survey, 2019, 54.5 percent of organizations say their business teams' requirements determine cloud usage. There are many strategies businesses can use to manage cloud costs and gain better visibility. Some of these include:

1. Organize costs

Any data set can be grouped into one or multiple categories, which is why tags are a powerful feature for organizing data. In the same manner, cloud costs can be grouped using tags.

For example, consider a project that contains all of the services applicable for an application. One set of tags could represent the components of that application (i.e. front end, back end) and another set of tags could represent common costs across applications (i.e. development, staging, testing). Creating customized tags based on the usage type of account is an efficient way to organize your cloud costs.

 2. Consolidate accounts

Based on your organization's cloud architecture, the functions to be performed on the cloud varies across teams. When you consolidate accounts by creating business units, you can easily assign ownership for the cloud cost to a business owner. With business units, you can view monthly cloud costs, and see the percentage change in the cloud costs accrued for a particular unit. This ensures accountability for your AWS bills.

 3. Allocate budgets

When users can simply swipe a credit card with no oversight, tracking your cloud costs isn't easy. Creating a budget and allocating it to different teams in your organization helps monitor overspending. Configure alerts for when a department overshoots a set budget (e.g., $2,000 per month for a specific team). 

 4. Analyze expenditure

A dashboard view based on service, region, resource, or individual cloud components helps you gain deep insights into your cloud bills. You can view your cloud costs according to linked accounts, or group the costs based on different teams, customers, or projects across business units.

 5. Utilize cost reports

Amidst your busy schedule, trying to understand your cloud costs is no easy task. It's important to view your spending at a granular level, and slice-and-dice reporting is an ideal way to do this. With a report customized to your needs and delivered to your inbox as often as you choose, you can analyze the cost per user, team, project, and resource type based on consumption.

These simple strategies can help organizations looking to gain control over their cloud costs, but implementing them is a challenge in itself. This is where an AWS cost management solution can come in handy. A reliable cloud cost management tool should offer:

• Cost dashboards
• Tagging strategies
• Team views
• Resource details, including their cost
• Cost trends monitoring
• Spend analysis
• Scheduled cost reports

 Why Site24x7 CloudSpend for AWS cost management?

CloudSpend is a cloud cost management solution that can help you implement all the abovementioned strategies to help you track AWS cloud resource consumption across departments, business groups, or projects. It can be used as your personal AWS cost optimization tool. You can even keep track of the costs spent on reserved instances and scheduled instances by adding customized tags to them. 

Take control of your AWS costs at affordable rates, and gain accurate insights to make timely decisions. Try our 30-day free trial, now!

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