When looking to cut expenses, your cloud spending may not be top of mind. However, optimizing your cloud environment can be an effective way to eliminate waste.  

Optimizing your cloud deployments cuts down on cloud sprawl and unnecessary spending, allowing organizations to adapt to reduced budgets and free up funds for innovation. This positions you for future success, but it's not without challenges.  

Cloud cost management affects organizations across cloud stages of cloud adoption. According to Unisys’ “From Barriers to Breakthroughs: Unlocking Growth opportunities with Cloud-enabled Innovation,” 23% struggle with cost management during the initial adoption, 21% during full adoption and 22% post-migration. These percentages underscore how difficult it is for companies to track and evaluate cloud choices as rigorously as they do other budgets and resources. 

Consider the controls in place for traditional data centers: accountability about floor space use, hardware management, resource depreciation and capacity planning for future demand. Cloud environments, with their theoretically unlimited capacity, make it easier to lose track of your deployments. However, strategies exist to detect and reduce cloud waste. 

Wasted cloud spending comes in many forms 

Using public cloud resources opens the opportunity for a variety of wasted cloud spending, including overprovisioned compute resources. Calculating the cost of a virtual machine (VM) is a surprisingly complex exercise based on the class of the virtual machine, in which cloud region you’re hosting it and other factors. But large VMs (those with more CPU cores and memory) are generally more costly than smaller ones. If you have VMs far larger than you need, you are throwing away your budget. Yet admins seldom, if ever, right-size VM resources — even if there is an overage. It’s like getting the wrong-sized house and spending extra for the upkeep. 

Other potential areas of cloud waste include: 

• Zombies: Unattached and unused storage and VMs that your company isn’t using. You’re just racking up extra costs and resources you simply do not need. 
• Hidden cloud fees: This includes cloud spending that escapes notice because of how easy it is for employees and teams to use cloud capacity without notifying IT first. However, there are strategies to identify hidden cloud fees. 

Targeted FinOps and cloud management can ease challenges 

Consider business outcomes when trimming your cloud spend.  

• Data transfer: If you’re currently transferring a large data load each night, determine if you can reduce the amount and frequency of data you’re sending. Doing so could decrease spending on data transfers and data storage and better drive your intended business outcomes. 
• Data archival: If your company has multiple subsidiaries or has grown through acquisition, you likely have created a data lake to collect business metrics. And your data lake has probably grown. At some point, someone needs to decide which data to archive and when to do it. 
• Application modernization: You can reduce the total cost of ownership as you refactor legacy applications and adopt more cloud-native services. Carefully consider your investments in application modernization to help achieve this. 

A FinOps practice can help by bringing together cloud operations and financial expertise and establishing a governance framework that empowers you to proactively manage and optimize your cloud spending. This approach provides the structure, tools, and insights needed to effectively address cloud cost challenges and ensure accountability across your organization.  

Use FinOps to make buying decisions that dramatically alter the cloud bill, such as buying reserved instances or making a minimum spend commitment to a cloud provider for a discount. You may also want to adopt a cloud management platform with quotas and approvals for provisioning. 

Optimize your cloud spending 

Many cost optimization tools look at current capacity and utilization. But they are not always smart enough to adjust to factors like seasonality and dynamic cloud environments. They may also lack the ability to predict cloud requirements so organizations can acquire precisely the right resources. 

Cloud management platforms and FinOps can help improve your cybersecurity posture and lower costs by spotting spikes and validating demand peaking. By optimizing your cloud spending, you can free resources to make your business stronger and more resilient. For technology that guides you in this effort, explore Unisys Cloud Financial Analysis and Optimization.