Cloud computing has many benefits. But there are also challenges, and cloud cost management may be one of the biggest. Here are 49 stats, benefits, and hard truths you need to know about cloud cost management, along with tips and requirements to help you take control and keep your spending in check while delivering on all the value you’re looking for.
In an on-premises environment, you have to pay for the capacity you have regardless of whether you’re using it, and you can’t exceed that capacity without purchasing and provisioning new hardware. In the cloud, however, you have much more flexibility thanks to cloud elasticity, which is the ability to automatically provision or deprovision resources based on workload changes.
I am a big proponent of cross-functional alignment, as I remnded our ELT at a recent off-site meeting. There’s a lot of buzz about FinOps bringing financial accountability to cloud spend by eliminating procurement siloes and implementing cross-functional best practices. As the CFO of a SaaS company, I fully support this practice. In fact, Virtana recently made some changes to our cloud infrastructure as part of our own evolution.
Cloud infrastructures have introduced increasing levels of complexity—you have to manage workloads across on-premises, private, and multiple public cloud environments. This requires you to migrate efficiently, optimize effectively, and stay rightsized on an ongoing basis, all while meeting evolving business requirements. With so many moving parts, it can be a massive challenge with lots of pitfalls that can cost you time and money and even put your business results in jeopardy.
Organizations need tools to manage their infrastructure, which today is expanding beyond the data center to include multiple public clouds. In fact, in a recent survey of hybrid cloud decision makers, we found that the vast majority of respondents (88%) have placed more than one-quarter of their workloads in the public cloud, and 44% indicated that they’re running more than half of their workloads in the public cloud.
Cloud teams are busy. In fact, Virtana’s recently published State of Hybrid Cloud and FinOps survey found that 44% of respondents have deployed more than half of their workloads in a public cloud, and 88% have deployed more than one-quarter of their workloads in a public cloud. That’s a lot of migration, optimization, and management on the cloud team’s plate; and it’s not just for right now but for the foreseeable future.
As CFO of Virtana, I face many of the same challenges as every CFO of a SaaS or enterprise software company today: cost containment, surprises, and an ever-escalating AWS bill. We all need help keeping these things in check. These challenges become even more difficult when your organization goes hybrid cloud. Fortunately, there are tools out there to help our teams help us manage these costs.
When you have workloads running in a hybrid, multi-cloud environment, it’s hard to get a unified view of your entire infrastructure. In fact, Virtana’s recently published State of Hybrid Cloud and FinOps survey reveals that only 36% of respondents said they have comprehensive, unified visibility and management capabilities across all their public clouds, leaving more than two-thirds (68%) with less-than-ideal conditions for managing their multi-cloud infrastructure.
Keeping applications on premises can seem so … stodgy and passé. If you believe the buzz, digital transformation, innovation, and agility are all happening in the public cloud. While there is some truth to this, the reality is more nuanced and complex.
Like many things in life, when you’re new to the cloud you don’t know what you don’t know. Given that migrating workloads to the public cloud is often a key component of a business transformation initiative, you want to avoid a long, expensive learning curve—especially since accelerating time-to-value is often a major impetus for the move.
