Insights

Remember when everyone proclaimed, ‘Move to the public cloud, it’s cheaper’? The truth is it can be. However, without evolved governance models, the absence of capacity constraints and increasingly high levels of user autonomy can lead to public cloud costs spiralling out of control. 

At Chamonix, we believe that when consumed correctly, the public cloud can be more cost-effective and even offer a competitive advantage. We recommend organisations implement cloud financial management (FinOps) capabilities that ensure cost visibility, and anomaly detection, allowing you to identify inefficiencies to optimise your public cloud spend. While most organisations that have adopted public cloud have implemented these processes, some common oversights can limit their success.   

Common Mistakes in Cloud Cost Management

Assuming Cloud Consumers Constantly Monitor Costs

Creating dashboards and daily reports is a great start, but they often go unnoticed. Why? Because business users are busy with their day-to-day activities and may not prioritise technology costs. IT must actively seek cost insights and draw attention to dashboards when costs aren’t meeting expectations.

Key Takeaway: Regularly review cost dashboards and highlight significant insights to relevant teams.

Asking Operational Teams to Optimise Everything 

Provisioning is often decentralised, leading to a disconnect between operational teams and the application owners. This lack of context can result in inefficiencies. Instead, engage operational teams to collaborate with application owners, generating actionable recommendations based on their observations. Application owners should then implement and validate optimisations.

Key Takeaway: Foster collaboration between operational teams and application owners for effective cost optimisation.

Letting Commitment Discounts Drive Cloud Adoption 

While commitment discounts can be attractive, overcommitment can lead to increased consumption just to meet those commitments.

Once you’re here your cloud principles go out the window and you will no longer care about: scheduling, removing idle resources, rightsizing or autoscaling. You’ve got to meet that commitment, right?

To truly understand your real cloud needs, optimise resource usage even at the risk of not fully utilising commitments. Mitigate the risks of overcommitment, ensure that commitment decisions are not solely made by business units or applications teams. They may opt for committed pricing simply because it appears cheaper, which can be misleading and used to superficially enhance business cases. 

Key Takeaway: Prioritise resource optimisation over commitment discounts to maintain cloud efficiency.

Reactively Managing Costs at Month-End 

Saving the best to last. Analysing spreadsheets at the end of the month is time-consuming and does not address ongoing spending issues. This reactive approach can lead to unaddressed issues and accruing costs, especially in large environments. Instead, implement continuous monitoring and proactive cost-management strategies.

Key Takeaway Adopt continuous cost monitoring to address issues as they arise.

Conclusion

If any of these scenarios sound familiar, Chamonix has real-world, hands-on experience, working with organisations to tackle these problems. By implementing effective FinOps practices, you can optimise your cloud spend and again a competitive advantage.

Reach out to get started on optimising your cloud costs today.