No More Shocks in Cloud Bills
- By Ceecee Wong
- March 25, 2019
Spending on the cloud has rocketed. IDC predicted that worldwide public cloud services spending would reach USD 210 billion this year, an increase of 23.8 percent over 2018.
However, the increased spend and the relentless pace of adoption are seeing more unmonitored, under-used or idle cloud resources on various platforms across multiple accounts. The net result: higher operational expenditures.
It is a huge headache for CDOs who first promised their Boards better operational expenditures and more streamlined spending.
Gartner research indicated that organizations without a plan for cloud cost management might be overspending by 70 percent or more.
The good news is that there are now solutions that tackle this head on.
Demystifying Cloud Spend
The newest cloud cost analytics platform to come on the scene is Site24x7's latest offering, CloudSpend.
In Singapore last week to promote its platform, the Site24x7 team from Zoho shared how local businesses could benefit financially in terms of analyzing business costs on the public cloud.
While Forrester reported that most Asia-Pacific markets are not mature enough to support cloud solutions and overall adoption lags that of the U.S. and Europe, in terms of APAC, Singapore is still a leader, second to only Japan.
The new solution attempts to bridge the gap between capacity planning and cost optimization for resources currently running in Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment.
The company has plans to extend support to other cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud soon.
CloudSpend's Business Intelligence (BI) insights allow businesses to visualize runaway expenditures and implement effective budget controls while reducing operational expenditure across multiple accounts. Besides giving cost analysis across accounts, CloudSpend also provides resources-level cost analysis – a feature that the AWS Cost Explorer lacked at the time of writing.
With 'Business Units,' organizations can attribute spending to one or more entities based on tags and understand the costs by different projects, departments, teams or cloud customers. Not many other cloud cost management platforms provide this feature out-of-the-box.
Under 'Budgets,' limits can be set for AWS accounts, business units or tagged resources and alerts sent out when spending exceeds budget, again a feature missing in AWS Cost Explorer.
Another feature would be the 'Out-of-the-box' views which allow users to gain a quick snapshot of an organization's AWS expenditure broken down by various dimensions with options to schedule them as reports.
Holistic Approach
The underlying strength of CloudSpend is in its ability to offer a holistic view of expenditures across multiple accounts.
Users will be able to analyze cloud cost and monitor the resources on the cloud, all from a single platform. Future integrations with in-memory optimization and governance will make it a worthwhile tool.
It also brings together BI insights for addressing cloud cost adjustments, allowing users to track cloud expenses, allocate resources based on priorities, and reduce overall operational expenditure.
Commenting on how CloudSpend complements Site24x7's AI-driven monitoring capabilities, product manager Srinivasa Raghavan said, “CloudSpend's addition to [those] capabilities not only streamlines and enhances performance of their applications on AWS but maintains an equilibrium when it comes to cloud spending, thus creating a win-win situation for DevOps and IT teams."
Its attractively-priced freemium model offers free services for accounts with AWS bills less than USD 3,000 per month. Pricing starts at 0.8 percent for small companies who spend less than USD 100,000 and for larger companies the charges go down to 0.5 percent of the AWS bill.
The pricing model is reportedly competitive when compared to most vendors that typically charge 2-3 percent of the AWS bill.
It remains to be seen whether CDOs will jump on its bandwagon.