As a cloud cost intelligence platform, we spend nearly every day talking to companies about their cloud cost — and there’s something we’ve noticed — people don’t generally have the warm and fuzzies for their cloud cost management tools. You know, the ones that have been around for a while, that you use to build reports about your cloud spend? We won’t refer to them by name. These popular tools have really given the whole category a bit of a bad rap.

The rise of public cloud services has enabled businesses to innovate faster, scale effortlessly, and adopt more advanced technologies easier than ever before. However, there’s a dark side to using public cloud services: complexity and cost. Public cloud services can scale to handle almost any workload, but in doing so, they can quickly generate unpredictable costs for your business.

More and more, we see our clients moving their workloads from clunky on-premise data centers to nimble cloud platforms, orchestrated container environments, such as Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift, or a combination of both. The technical aspects of such a migration are typically well-known. Your IT staff does a great job managing these environments: Still, there is one more aspect of managing these environments that is often overlooked — cost.

We all want growth, but we often find ourselves unequipped to deal with it. It’s a bit like going to the gym, lifting weights, and seeing real results, only to realize that you no longer fit into your old clothes. Now you have to decide if you want to modify them or buy new clothes. We can use this very simple analogy to understand the differences between horizontal and vertical scaling.

The software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry has been rapidly growing and, as a result, has become increasingly competitive. As the space becomes more crowded, it becomes even more important for SaaS companies to find unique ways to establish a competitive advantage. One of the most effective ways for a SaaS company to outperform its competitors is by implementing a SaaS-specific pricing strategy. With a better approach to pricing, companies can operate more efficiently and improve their margins.

Businesses move to the cloud for several reasons. For some, moving to the cloud means gaining access to the best enterprise-level technology without the associated costs of handling, maintaining, and managing the underlying infrastructure. For others (like startups), the ability to scale quickly and respond faster to market demands are top of the list.

The pandemic upended business for many or at the very least cast a grim shade of uncertainty, so, as many took to working from home, they also were commissioned with cutting waste. Among the biggest sources of misspend in 2020 – cloud services. And remote work may have actually spurred the problem, as organizations migrate more applications to the cloud to support these workers.

Automation does not only eliminate the mundaneness of performing repetitive tasks, it can also help reduce errors and mistakes. Good cloud infrastructure encourages cloud automation. That should be one of the main motivators of implementing it. As ubiquitous as the idea of cloud computing has become in the last decade, there is still a lot of demystification to be done. People still don't fully understand its potential. Yes, it can save you money and time but how?

One of the biggest benefits of the cloud is that it gives engineering teams the freedom to deploy and iterate applications quickly. Unlike traditional IT environments where engineers require a series of approvals before embarking on projects, in the cloud, engineers can choose from several managed services and deploy them at the click of a button. This means your team can innovate faster and respond quickly to market demands.

Whether you've recently migrated to the cloud, or you've been operating there for awhile now, you've likely realized how challenging it can be to understand exactly where your cloud spend goes and what drives your costs. Using a cloud service provider can offer many benefits, like the ability to easily scale up and down based on need, but unless you're using the right services and tools, your costs can quickly spiral out of control.