Cloud Cost Management (CCM) platform helps companies to have real-time visibility into cloud resources, usage patterns, and cost allocation that enables them to optimize their cloud spend, identify inefficiencies and anticipate their cloud costs.
Why is Cloud Cost Management (CCM) Essential?
In recent years most companies have been switching their businesses and operations to cloud infrastructure due to the numerous benefits such as cost savings, scalability, higher performance, centralization, business continuity, security, and many more.
As per the Grandview research report, global cloud computing market spending in 2022 of USD 483.98 billion is expected to grow to USD 1,554.94 billion in 2030.
In short, cloud computing is transforming the way businesses (from SMBs to large enterprises) operate. However, these benefits bring new challenges, specifically the growing cloud cost.
Spending on the cloud is rising and failing to understand prices can have serious financial repercussions.
A lack of effective cloud cost management may lead to unforeseen cost increases, overpayment for underused resources, or even subpar performance.
As per Cloudzero research, 49% of organizations said cloud costs are higher than they should be, and Only 3 out of 10 organizations know exactly where their cloud spend is going.
Cloud cost management is the cost management strategy that organizations need to adopt to optimize their cloud infrastructure to keep costs in check. In CCM, the organizations implement strategies to maximize cloud usage and increase efficiency, thereby reducing the overall Cloud infrastructure cost.
Effective cloud cost management is essential because it helps organizations of all sizes to optimize their cloud usage by identifying cost-saving opportunities and avoiding unexpected expenses. Adopting a cloud cost management strategy can assist a business in forecasting future expenses and usage and boost overall profits.
Companies may more successfully impose responsibility throughout the organization and enhance the effectiveness of their cloud technology with a better awareness of cloud expenses and utilization.
Benefits of Cloud Cost Management (CCM)
The adoption of cloud computing is increasing tenfold across diversified sectors due to its scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. However, with the benefits of the cloud come new challenges, particularly in cost management. This is where cloud cost management tools come into the picture.
The following are a few top benefits of adopting cloud cost management tools:
- The capacity of CCM to precisely estimate and control costs is one of the biggest advantages of using it. This enables businesses to optimize their cloud expenditures and reduce wasteful spending.
- With the help of CCM solutions, businesses can better manage their cloud resources and budgets by having visibility into consumption and expenditures.
- Tools for managing cloud costs can also produce cost-saving insights, such as locating underutilized resources or chances to leverage economic cloud services.
- CCM can assist enterprises in making knowledgeable decisions about their cloud usage by maximizing resource utilization and offering thorough cost analysis.
- Businesses can use CCM to pinpoint areas where costs can be cut, prevent unforeseen budgetary costs, and ultimately save money.
To conclude, CCM tools benefits in forecasting cloud usage, scalability plans, performance improvement, delivering solutions by staying compliant, adopting best security measures, and important cost savings.
How to Pick the Best Cloud Cost Management Tool?
Due to continually changing business objectives, technology, application requirements, cloud pricing, and many other factors, maintaining cloud costs is dynamic in nature. Due to the extreme complexity of the cloud environment, it is essential to have precise metrics, analytics, and automation for cloud cost optimization to be successful.
A few characteristics of cloud cost management solutions that would simplify the process include the following:
- Automation and AI-driven platform
- Identify idle and unutilized Cloud resources
- Able to predict Cloud usage based on granular levels
- Right-Size the Services
- Comprehensive reporting
- Visibility and in-depth spending analysis
- Use Reserved Instances and Leverage Spot Instances
- Monitor Cost Anomalies
- Use Appropriate Storage Options
- Able to provide cost analysis at each stage of the SDLC
- Identify and Minimize Software License Costs
- Notifications on breaching cost thresholds
- Create and manage multiple cost budgets
- Alerts on exceeding resource utilization
Above mentioned features will surely help you to pick the right cost-management tool for your cloud environment. But as we progress into a tech-driven world, there is a high probability that these tools will come up with unique features that would further ease the cost management of cloud infrastructure.
Now, we will look into the best cloud cost management tools.
Datadog
A cloud monitoring tool Datadog provides a wide range of options for reducing excess cloud costs. Its cloud cost management features help users to easily track and allocate their cloud spending, forecast cost trends and identify irregularities to increase cost-effectiveness.
Datadog platform helps optimize the cloud infrastructure by identifying cloud workload downsizing or resizing, offering clear insights into cloud expenditures. All things considered, it is a useful tool for companies of any size to get granular visibility into cloud costs across all cloud resources.
Features
- Granular level cost breakdown across the cloud environment.
- Custom dashboards to get visibility into cloud costs.
- Identifies top cost changes related to teams, services, etc., in a cloud environment.
- Dashboards to share the cost across FinOps, Engineering, and other teams.
All cloud service providers can optimize their spending in a multi-cloud scenario with the help of DatadogHQ, a comprehensive tool. Companies can quickly monitor and optimize their cloud usage in real-time due to its in-depth analytics, ensuring they aren’t overspending or over-provisioning. Its full version can be tested for 14 days free of cost.
Google Cloud
If you are using Google cloud, then you can use its Cloud cost management platform to track, manage, and optimize cloud expenses. By adopting these tools, you may track the use of cloud resources, set budget alerts, view expenses, predict trends, etc.
In other words, these optimization techniques will enable you to reduce your cloud computing expenses.
Google‘s specific platform for cost management offers a variety of metrics to see current cost trends and optimize your Cloud prices based on its intelligent recommendations.
Its precise cost allocation enables managers to comprehend where each dollar is being spent, making it simpler to spot areas where overall spending can be cut and how the entire cloud infrastructure should be optimized.
Features
- Smart recommendations for immediate cost savings and greater efficiency.
- Resource hierarchy to control granular access for cost allocation.
- Billing access controls and Quota limits to control spending to prevent unforeseen spikes in usage.
- Budget alerts and notifications to alert whenever the cost exceeds defined thresholds and to cap costs to prevent unexpected spending.
- Provision to export billing data to BigQuery for detailed cost analysis.
The cost management platform for Google Cloud gives SMBs and large businesses the tools they need to find cost-saving opportunities, enhance cloud governance, and ultimately spur company growth.
Harness
Harness is a robust and trustworthy platform for software distribution that aids businesses in streamlining the procedure for delivering code changes in various contexts. Cloud cost management platform is one of Harness’s main platforms.
This platform provides a thorough insight into how much money a firm spends on cloud services from various cloud providers.
Harness Cloud‘s cost management software enables businesses to cut their cloud costs by up to 70%. It accomplishes this goal by automating processes and identifying and eliminating wasteful cloud costs.
The platform provides deep visibility into your cloud costs, emphasizing proactive automation to cut down on extra costs.
With the help of this technology, clients can maximize their use of the cloud and identify any inefficiencies or unused resources that might be raising prices.
All significant cloud service providers, including AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure, are compatible with this cloud cost management application.
Features
- Kubernetes cluster automation to improve resource availability and lower infrastructure expenses.
- Effective management of cloud resource idle time using cloud auto-stopping.
- Completely personalized dashboard for viewing project-related cost data.
- Automation of resource allocation and tagging.
Businesses can track and analyze their cloud spending using Harness, set up cost thresholds and alerts, and optimize their usage for maximum effectiveness. To sum up, Harness assists businesses in lowering their cloud costs, achieving more predictable budgets, and fostering growth and profitability.
The platform is free to use up to 250k cloud spend, and if you are looking for unlimited cloud spending, you can upgrade to Team or Enterprise plans.
nOps
Are you using Amazon cloud services (AWS) and looking to reduce the cloud bill? Then nOps can come to your rescue. The site claims it can reduce up to 50% of AWS cost.
nOps is an Advanced Technology Partner in the Amazon partner Network. It helps companies to manage and run a cost-optimized AWS infrastructure with the added advantage of security, reliability, and compliance.
nOps is an award-winning platform that provides better visibility to engineers into AWS pricing and automation tools that would help them track, analyze and optimize complex cloud infrastructure.
It runs on autopilot, which helps engineers to divert their efforts to innovation rather than sticking around manual activities to fix the inefficiencies to cut down costs.
Features
- Automatically purchases and sells RIs (Reserved instances) depending on infrastructure changes.
- Advanced mechanism to locate idle resources and shut them off to save on cloud bill.
- nOps team is SOC2 Type2 certified.
- It provides an easy, risk-free solution for lowering your EC2/Fargate/RDS spend.
nOPS is a cutting-edge tech company that provides an AWS management solution that runs on autopilot to reduce cloud costs. The company charges a fraction of the customer’s savings, a unique pricing strategy.
Zesty
Zesty is an AI-driven cloud infrastructure management platform trusted by thousands of companies worldwide to automatically scale cloud resources to fulfill dynamic business requirements.
Its unique platform predicts traffic patterns and adjusts cloud resources accordingly to achieve optimal cloud usage and a reduction in cloud spend. It has two solutions: Commitment Manager for C2 and Zesty Disk for auto-scaling of block storages.
Zesty platform helps businesses to curb overpaying for resources they don’t need during non-business hours and, conversely, helps businesses to optimize resources during business hours for optimal performance.
Zesty automation helps organizations understand the need in real-time and deploy cloud resources based on business demand, thereby reducing cloud costs and ensuring customers have smooth services irrespective of traffic spikes.
Features
- Real-time monitoring and analytics help businesses optimize their resources and make informed decisions.
- Automatic buying and selling of AWS RI to reduce costs by up to 60 percent.
- Save up to 70 percent on AWS and Azure block storage by automatically shrinking and expanding block storage volumes.
- Eliminates risk through a buy-back guarantee for any over-provisioned RIs.
Zesty platform is designed considering the ever-changing dynamic requirement of cloud services to ensure optimal performance without overpaying. Zesty ensures your application or website is always running optimally and is cost-effective.
The pricing model of Zetsy is purely based on results, so if customers don’t save, then they don’t have to pay anything to Zesty. Its free version can be used for monitoring and visibility.
Cloudzero
CloudZero’s platform helps companies drill down into cloud spending through ML and Advanced analytics to get insights into overall cloud infrastructure to get a comprehensive and granular view into individual service consumption, reservations, and underutilization.
Top cloud-driven companies like Rapid7, Ping Identity, and Malwarebytes trust Cloudzero.
The platform provides end-to-end visibility into cloud resources and costs, enabling improved unit economics and efficient spending.
Cloudzero aligns engineering and finance teams around metrics like cost per product that helps Engineers to develop cost-conscious, targeted, and efficient solutions. The finance team gets insights into activities to keep track of deployed solutions within target budgets.
Its tailor-made solutions benefit and provide great results for all sizes and types of organizations. Its various tools for cost management allows customers to identify inefficiencies where they can cut down cost.
Features
- Advanced cost allocation and tagging for immediate business visions.
- Calculate COGS, unit costs, cost per customer, Kubernetes costs, and other costs.
- Aligns various teams, such as engineering, development, and finance, around a single cost to avoid overspending.
- Finance teams get the privilege to block and allow cloud finance that helps to maintain engineering cost accountability.
Its ongoing innovation and adaptable features make it the perfect choice for enterprises seeking operational effectiveness, cloud infrastructure optimization, and cost savings. If you are willing to assess your existing cloud cost management, then you can visit its free assessment page.
Apptio
Apptio is used by more than 60% of Fortune 100 firms for cloud cost control and other cloud solutions. By efficient cloud spending management, enabling team ownership, and proper cost allocation, Apptio assists businesses in achieving outstanding business outcomes.
With accountability and visibility, Apptio maximizes the business value of your cloud expenditures.
The Forrester Wave has ranked Apptio Cloudability as a Leader among cloud cost management and optimization (CCMO) service providers for Q3 2022. It’s based on standards, including performance, cloud visibility, pricing, and support for cloud platforms.
Apptio looks into the entire life cycle of the FinOps framework, from understanding fully loaded costs, Benchmark performance, and Optimizing usage and rates. According to the website, customers claim a 30% decrease in cloud prices, a 100% reduction in cloud allocation fees, and 90% reservation coverage.
Features
- Highlights underused and unused resources and make them the proper size to optimize cloud spending and utilization continuously.
- Distributes cloud spend accurately throughout business units, products, cost centers, and roles.
- Provides Cloud cost visibility that helps you remain within budget by letting you know who is spending money where.
- Its Cloudability Shift tool helps cloud engineers quickly assess, plan, and monitor migrations to the public cloud.
All of the elements responsible for cloud cost optimization are covered by a comprehensive, cutting-edge Apptio Cloud cost management platform, which optimizes cloud resources for price, speed, and quality.
ManageEngine Cloud Spend
ManageEngine CloudSpend helps optimize your cloud costs by adopting best practices like implementing chargebacks, reserving capacity, and rightsizing resources. In short, it helps to take control of your cloud costs and provide better cloud cost visibility.
ManageEngine claims its 50-plus best cloud cost practices lead to a 33% reduction in cost and 60% less time spent tracking cloud bills.
Cloudspend allows the creation of BU (Business units) to track cost accountability at various sections. It helps to drill down to get a detailed analysis of the cloud spending of individual teams, and its tracking ability provides visibility of every dollar spent.
It’s an intuitive and comprehensive dashboard that gives complete visibility into cost categories that help with cost optimizations, such as data transfer type, region, operation type, usage type, etc.
Features
- Auto-generated and user-defined tags to isolate and analyze subsets of your cloud costs.
- Feasible to track costs for different teams, projects, and customers.
- Forecasts based on historical data and gain insights to stay on track to meet the budget goals.
- Track accruing costs to analyze cost plans, usage, and performance.
ManageEngine CloudSpend helps organizations utilize cloud resources efficiently and reduce unnecessary costs. ManageEngine helps to administer, analyze, and track cloud costs of Azure and AWS environments.
CloudSpend can be tried for 30 days free of cost, and based on your cloud bills, you can switch to paid plans. Up to $3,000/month cloud bill, you can use it free of cost.
Virtana
For organizations of all sizes, cloud cost management is a challenging and complicated activity. The price of these services has increased along with the rising use of cloud technologies. Herein lies the value of Virtana cloud cost management.
It provides a complete solution that aids businesses in pinpointing wasteful spending, streamlining resource allocation, and tracking cloud utilization.
Virtana Cloud Cost Management assists businesses in managing hybrid cloud IT infrastructure continuously and in real time by optimizing cost, capacity, and performance.
The software also offers cost allocation, which enables companies to track their financial restrictions more effectively and produce reliable cloud investment reports.
The organization can satisfy SLA and stay within budget due to its real-time data collecting and analytics. You can take charge of your cloud spending with Virtana through its centralized view of cloud utilization and expenditure, find ways to save costs, and set up automated policies for more efficient resource allocation.
Features
- Proactive resource identification.
- Enhancing cloud resource planning to achieve targeted business results.
- Obtains a thorough understanding of your hybrid cloud bills.
- Automated instance optimization with rightsizing suggestions.
Businesses worldwide are achieving substantial advancements in cost-effective and efficient cloud computing, with enhanced transparency and visibility across their whole cloud architecture, by utilizing Virtana’s technologies.
Final Words
Businesses may optimize their cloud cost with the help of cloud cost management tools. In a cloud deployment, each workload has certain requirements that change over time.
You should establish performance limits for each task based on domain expertise and actual operational metrics to minimize cloud expenditures. The goal of cloud optimization is to keep performance standards in place while lowering expenses.
Businesses that have implemented cloud technology to obtain better control to stop waste and overspending must prioritize cloud cost management.
These technologies will benefit your cloud environment. Businesses can use cloud infrastructure to optimize cost-effectiveness, achieve business outcomes, and make well-informed decisions about cloud investments.
Next, check out cloud cost optimization solutions for AWS, Azure, GCP, and more.