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Aligning cloud spend management with cloud transformation 1

Aligning cloud spend management with cloud transformation

Since the pandemic, businesses have invested greatly in digital transformation as that seems to be the future in technology. Cloud transformation is a key element in the process. Read this article to learn more about aligning cloud spend management with cloud transformation.

Digital transformation is growing at an accelerated pace. Since the pandemic, businesses are aggressively investing in digital transformation solutions, and cloud transformation is an essential inclusion in the process. Unsurprisingly, more than half of the enterprise organizations are already planning to move to a cloud-native infrastructure.

There is a reason for such an increase in the adoption of cloud migration. It offers economies of scale and connectivity, which is impossible with other infrastructures. With the cloud, companies can better use data to identify opportunities. With this large-scale adoption, the spending on cloud infrastructure is also increasing. According to IDC, the spending on cloud technology increased by 13.5% in 2021 to reach $21 billion compared to 2020.

The benefits are making companies shift to the cloud. However, if not managed efficiently, your cloud infrastructure investment can end up going out of budget. The cloud is different from any other hosting domain because you can manage the resources to the micro level. You pay for what you use, which means any unplanned cloud transformation can result in unexpected access costs. It can also lead to issues like applications consuming more resources and underperformance caused due to architectural limitations.

The solution lies in aligning cloud spend management with your cloud transformation goals. That’s what we will explore in this article.

What is cloud spend management? 

Before the digital transformation, every business must practice effective cloud spend management. It is a phase of strategic planning to gain insights needed to optimize current cloud resources and cloud spending through control budgeting and future cloud usage prediction. Successful cloud spend management enables businesses to easily avoid the pitfalls of overspending and have better control of the cloud-based environment.

The most important aspects of a cloud spend management strategy are:

1. Cloud cost management 

It involves not just cloud management but bringing teams together to fuel innovation and facilitate better use of cloud technology for cost reduction.

2. Cloud cost optimization 

Optimizing cloud spending ensures you are not wasting money paying for more resources than necessary. With cloud cost optimization, you can free up more capital to invest in an overall digital transformation strategy.

3. Cloud cost visibility 

This gives businesses a more accurate view of cloud spending, irrespective of the complex infrastructure. It covers all aspects of intelligent expense management.

What do you need for cloud spend management? 

Spending management processes require readiness. Whether you are an organization planning cloud migration or struggling to make existing cloud spending more visible, you will need monitoring tools. For instance, AWS has Amazon CloudWatch that enables monitoring of your estimated charges. It continuously monitors your cloud resource utilization and sends you alerts based on predetermined billing rules you set up in your account.

Also, better spending controls are needed to deal with unplanned costs. Spending accountability allows you to identify any internal lapses leading to increased costs. You need to identify the groups that can benefit from more training, guidance, and resources to realize the full potential of cloud transformation.

Why do we need cloud spend management? 

Delving into cloud technology can be daunting for any business. With effective cloud cost management, a lot can be achieved.

1. It increases transparency and visibility 

With cloud spend management, you can get a more profound and insightful view of your cloud usage across single or multi-cloud environments. DevOps engineers can quickly identify underutilized or wasted resources and identify cost-saving opportunities.

2. Optimize cloud spending 

With cloud cost management, you can maintain a consumption-based approach and track current cloud resource usage to rein in any unpredictable cloud spending. It also gives you more control over how your business uses cloud resources across several units. You can create centralized tagging to govern cloud resources across the enterprise.

3. Long-term strategy and actionable data

You acquire the data that helps you create a long-term plan to monitor cloud resource consumption consistently. Most enterprises use cloud spend management to track resource utilization for making informed decisions about cloud technology usage. Cloud spend management also implies that you are better under the business demands and can create actionable data to improve compliance, guide right-size cloud investment, and offer better security.

Conclusion 

Successful alignment of cloud spend management, and cloud transformation brings in agility. You can gauge the impact of cloud transformation much better with cloud spend management.

Insightful data provides a clear picture of the newly increased cost of cloud migration in improving operations. You get scalability and data management capabilities that offer a competitive advantage. Cloud adoption is rising, and if you are not already on the bandwagon, you will miss out on critical advancements for business success.

Since cloud transformation costs can be unpredictable, you can always remain in control of cloud spend management. It is a critical practice that needs a one-and-one approach to evolve and improve as your cloud requirements change or grow.

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Girish

Girish

Girish is Talent500’s architect for systems software. His experience in backend development has helped him convert visions of many a product into reality. From his days at BITS-Pilani, he has always dreamt about beating AplhaZero at chess.

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