The Case for Cloud Cost Monitoring and Optimization (CCMO)

Migrating to the cloud offers many benefits, including flexibility, scalability and cost optimization. Businesses can move from fixed cost IT infrastructure management to more agile, secure and scalable operations. The move to the cloud is gaining momentum, with Gartner predicting that global spending on public cloud will increase by about 20.7% to reach $591.8 billion in 2023. But management, and especially cloud management costs, it can be challenging. Cloud Cost Monitoring and Optimization (CCMO) can help.

Why? Today, it is common practice for businesses to use multiple cloud vendors, either by design or due to mergers or acquisitions. A report from 451 Research states that 98% of enterprises already use or plan to use at least two cloud infrastructure providers, while 31% employ four or more services. This trend has good reasons, such as choosing specific functionality from different vendors or avoiding single vendor dependency by running applications on various clouds. Additionally, multiple vendors ensure business continuity in the event of a problem or outage.

However, migrating operations to multi-cloud environments presents several challenges as well as benefits:

Visibility challenges

Organizations lack visibility into multi-cloud operations, resources, readiness, and health. Different cloud service providers have unique requirements, architectures, interfaces, and monitoring options. Free basic monitoring tools are insufficient, and vendor monitoring services are expensive, especially with multiple vendors. Interoperability issues between cloud vendors limit visibility, creating blind spots that can hinder effective detection and response to threats. Additionally, IT departments lack the budget, time and resources to become experts on each vendor.

Cloud expansion and cost control

Cloud expansion, the uncontrolled growth of cloud usage, leads to software overload, unused storage space, and outdated virtual systems. Cloud-native businesses also face this problem, and organizations without end-to-end visibility could end up paying for resources they don’t need or use. Multi-cloud operations exacerbate sprawl, resulting in unnecessary spending. Businesses need a comprehensive method to manage cloud processes and expenses by identifying and eliminating costs for unused services.

See also: Over $100 billion wasted if cloud migration fails

Incident resolution and risk mitigation

Limited visibility and cloud expansion expose businesses to increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks. The complexity of manually managing multiple cloud services, on-premises systems, and private clouds contributes to security issues. Effective incident response requires vendor-specific security solutions or an internal resolution protocol. Both options require real-time monitoring, analysis of incident data and coordination with system managers. A comprehensive multi-cloud strategy with vendor-neutral tools is essential to prevent attacks and avoid additional costs for specific security solutions.

Introducing Vendor Independent CCMOs

A clear cloud strategy is critical to successful cloud migration and management. Without guidance, businesses may face technology silos, non-standardized implementations, cloud expansion, higher costs, and increased risk exposure. Effective cloud management requires full observation of operations. Vendor-agnostic Cloud Cost Monitoring and Optimization (CCMO) tools simplify monitoring across public and private clouds. Powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, these tools provide multiple benefits and a competitive edge for your cloud transition. Here are some of the important ways a vendor-neutral CCMO tool can support a company’s cloud management strategy:

End-to-end visibility

A vendor-neutral CCMO tool provides complete visibility into all cloud resources, regardless of vendor, location, technology, application or platform. It reduces complexity and sprawl by collecting data from various cloud resources and mapping infrastructure in real time. A centralized monitoring console provides a holistic view of cloud operations, enabling real-time transparency and observability to provide intelligent insights and granular data analytics to understand usage and distribution across regions, service providers or business units. This intelligence drives cloud optimization, improves cost visibility, and helps identify and address cloud sprawl and unnecessary items before they spread.

Autonomous cloud lifecycle operations

A CCMO agnostic tool enables efficient management and optimization of complex cloud environments. Automation tools handle routine tasks, such as user management, integrity checks, event management, and compliance. This reduces resource load and minimizes disruption during updates and patches. The centralized monitoring provided by the CCMO tool enables proactive system status checks and automated IT event management. Continuous monitoring evaluates system availability and integrity, identifies alerts, and self-resolves incidents through a closed-loop approach. If incidents cannot be resolved on their own, they are escalated for remediation. This reduces downtime and mean time to resolution (MTTR).

Improved financial management

A CCMO agnostic tool offers enhanced observation capabilities to track cloud spend and conduct comprehensive cost analysis. Compare spend to earned value, follow spend tracking protocols, and compare performance. Anomaly detection identifies patterns, trends, outliers, and root causes, alerting enterprise cloud teams to potential issues. With cost and usage visibility, the tool provides right-sizing recommendations for resource optimization and cost savings. Help identify revenue losses, accurately forecast cloud costs, and plan budgets. Ultimately, accelerate the realization of business value from cloud deployments.

Improved governance with asset tagging

Enterprises use tags to identify cloud resources, providing insight into usage and costs. Improper labeling can lead to inflated bills and inefficient use of resources. A CCMO agnostic tool enhances the tagging mechanism by identifying untagged assets and facilitating tag policies across all vendors, units, technologies and applications. Tag-based access management detects cloud expansion by evaluating mandatory tags such as business unit, application, and environment. This improves understanding of resources, increases security and compliance, and limits access to authorized users only.

While migrating to the cloud strategically presents many challenges in this era of cloud-based commerce, adding a robust vendor-neutral CCMO tool at the center of a cloud management strategy can be a real game changer. . Having a dedicated, independent resource that measures utility, effectively tracks assets, automates tasks, detects anomalies, and optimizes costs in real-time positions businesses for competitive success.