by Alex Gray, NZ Regional Manager & Margaret Chan, Principal Consultant
As organisations look to move data workloads up to one of the cloud providers, they are finding a changing paradigm in how the costs for those workloads are being generated and managed. It changes from the on premise model of upfront project CAPEX costs to support software and infrastructure requirements, to an ongoing OPEX like model, where costs are driven by the types of services used and how much they are being consumed.
Understanding these costs, managing and accounting for them, becomes a significant challenge and is one of the ultimate factors in an organisations cloud journey success. Without putting in good cost management, your organisation will be reacting to fluctuating cloud bills that become more difficult to support, the more cloud components that you use and the more workloads you put up there.
The cloud providers do have cost reporting out of the box, though we find this not granular enough to be able to really manage and cost account, once you have multiple workloads of differing types up there. They do also allow access for more granular data to be extracted, especially if you are to tag your components correctly.
Altis can help your organisation to design the tagging, access the granular cost data out of the cloud providers, store it and build triggers off that data, that allow your organisation to get an almost real time proactive cost monitoring system in place. This will significantly improve your success, allow for easier gauging on your ROI per project and give the bang for your cloud spend, buck. This includes bring cloud costs from different platforms together.
We can also help you to open the conversations around who is paying for the data workloads in the cloud and how you can support those areas of the business, to really manage those costs and have power over how they can best consume the cloud services. We often help organisations initially with a cloud cost management workshop and advisory work in this spa
Connect with us if you’d like to discuss billing dashboards or optimising your Cloud Usage.