The way Clod Cost Creep sets in, it’s very clear that a mere deployment of resources over cloud platform will not automatically optimize the costs for your business. You need to take a deeper dive, find reasons for your costs creeping out of control and set in the right strategies to prevent the creep and cut cloud costs.

Rightsize Your Cloud Resources

Rightsizing the resources means finding a balance between the demand and supply. The problem with traditional resources is that you need to make estimates about your requirements and even with those, you always need to overprovision, for you never know when the demand can shoot up and if you shall instantly be able to meet those increased resource requirements.

This issue is overcome with the on-demand availability of resources over the cloud. However, with the on-demand availability of resources comes the flexibility to use them at will. So, what happens is the users keep adding up to the resources without even realizing that they are only overprovisioning the cloud resources and having no idea about the costs that is adding up to the budgets. Having this realization is important and this is where rightsizing comes in.

When you rightsize, you are able to ensure that you don’t have resources in excess while also being assured that the resources will not go under capacity at any point to hinder your operational working. This will help you manage your workflows just fine making sure that you are well within your cloud budgets with a demand supply balance and optimal resource use.

Keep a Track of Cloud Server and Resource Usage

Once you have rightsized resources, you need to look into how these cloud resources are being used within your organization. With unlimited flexibility over the cloud, it becomes easier for the developers to open up a project environment in the cloud server and start working on it. What happens in the process is that the IT department and upper management staff fails to get a notice of the fact of creation of such environments. Another issue that comes in the picture is that while the developers create such environment, they often forget to close those environments. The result is that these environments become a permanent addition to your IT bills thus shooting up your cloud costs.

So, it’s important to keep a track of these cloud server usage patterns. The creation of cloud environments does not itself leads to the cloud creeps but the unattended and irresponsible usage of them does. So, you need to have systems in place to keep a check on the cloud environments created by your developers and also make sure that they are turned off when not in use.

Select the Resources Intelligibly based on Business Requirements

Generally, organizations prefer to take up on-demand cloud resources that are priced on a pay per use basis so that they can use the servers based on needs and requirements by switching them on only at the time of usage. However, this can come of as costly since you may end up taking more resources than you need as you have the flexibility to source the resources at any time. It is also a possibility that you miss out on turning off the servers which will then add up to the bills even when the resources are not in use. Another factor is every cloud service is priced differently and that means that it’s not very easy to determine the cloud costs upfront and can later make you go off budget. So, for the want of flexibility, you end up taking the wrong resources and using more space and servers than you had estimated.

The need is for you to look into your organizational and business needs and requirements and then select the resources you need intelligibly. There are different cloud services packages and you can even take customized packages to meet your specific requirements. You need to analyze these packages along with your business models and then select the services you need to prevent the cost creep.