Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

One of the key advantages of cloud services versus on premise deployments is the wide range of purchasing options and pricing models. While it’s an attractive advantage, it can be complicated for organizations to determine the best blend of service pricing models. The ability to define the organization’s blend of purchasing strategies and display the target versus actual performance is critical for optimizing cloud cost management efforts.

The age of growth-at-all-costs is over. Profitability matters — and it matters now. For SaaS companies who rely heavily on the public cloud, understanding what’s driving (or hurting) profitability can be tricky. Different customers have different needs and usage patterns, drive different levels of cost, and impact profitability unequally. Cybersecurity has played a central role in CloudZero from the beginning —or really, before it.

Managing gas bills has a lot in common with managing cloud spend. In the summer, our gas bill increased with our summer adventures. Sitting home with the kids out of school and the warm summer months was not an option. Likewise, while discounts on gas certainly help, in reality they do not put much of a dent in the overall bill. The cheapest gallon of gas is still the one not used. If you’re a modern cloud-native business, you can’t just stop using the cloud.

When you’re operating in the cloud, making the right decisions is not always easy because there’s a lot of ground to cover, especially with regard to cost. The elastic nature of cloud infrastructure means your costs could quickly spiral out of control if you don’t have guardrails in place to help keep costs down. Properly managing your cloud costs is important, especially for SaaS companies. Cloud spend impacts your COGS, which in turn affects revenue and valuation.

Great leaders know how to think big. As a VPE or CTO, your leadership role puts you in a position to make important changes and guide policy. But as a technical leader of your company, you’re almost always incredibly busy. It’s impossible to handle every single demand on any given day, which makes prioritization of tasks an important part of your daily decision-making. How do you know you’re making the right choices and working on the items that will make the largest impact?

Cloud migration efforts continue to grow today as organizations move into a post-pandemic work environment. According to McKinsey & Company, by 2024, most enterprises aspire to have $8 out of every $10 for IT hosting go toward the cloud. In a survey by Morgan Stanley, CIOs say cloud computing will see the highest rate of IT spending growth in 2022.

Let’s imagine, for a moment, that we live in a perfect world. In that world, you could check your company’s cloud bills and financial reports and find cleanly organized categories of spending that help you instantly understand where your money is going and why. Your engineers would meticulously label every spend item with useful metadata tags so you can clearly see which costs have increased and which are most affecting your bottom line.

Picking the right AWS instance is challenging because you have to match the ever-changing resource usage patterns of your apps with the 500+ AWS instance types, and the result is over-provisioning and waste. Nearly one-third of businesses exceed their cloud budgets by as much as 40%, in part due to poorly sized instances.

You work hard to deliver a great product to your target market. Yet, when it’s time to price your worth, it’s challenging to set a fair pricing strategy, model, or amount. This anxiety is understandable. If you charge too much, you could lose potential and existing customers. If you are a start-up, this bad first impression can be detrimental to your growth. For larger businesses, some customers may feel you are losing touch and switch to newer or veteran competitors.