Continuous Cost Control provides a holistic view of enterprise financials as clients migrate to the cloud and live in the cloud. This means that both the CBO,
and those charged with the continuous cost management processes, have an
understanding of how much is being spent, on what workloads, and by whom
in the enterprise. Unlike a traditional data center, the cloud enables you to gain
a significantly more granular level of detail around computing costs.
Some key features of Continuous Cost Control i nclude:
• End-to-end visibility of financial metrics, including what budgets have
been allocated to which workloads. Moreover, how consumption or burn
is occurring on each, based on what is been planned versus actual costs.
• Cost comparison between current baseline costs. TCO calculations and
actual cloud spend leverage best in class cost management tools. The use
of automation here is distinctive, including cost monitoring and cost
governance tools that provide a view into what is being spent, the aggregation of cost metrics to understand patterns, as well as the ability to
look at just an instance in time.
• Continuous monitoring and alerts determine which costs are off target,
and ensure they can be corrected before the issue becomes too
expensive.
• Automated recommendations and cost optimization. Understand when
costs are not aligned with expectations, and how to optimize spend as
well. For example, the ability to leverage discounted spot instances versus reserved instances for certain processing.
Managing the Cloud’s Tipping Point
Cloud services, either public or private, are becoming systemic to everything,
including enterprise infrastructure and applications, IoT, mobile computing,
and more. Enterprises find success in how cloud computing provides the path
of least resistance, and it is typically the most cost effective solution. Unless
there are major issues uncovered with the cloud, and that does not seem to be
the case so far, cloud computing will continue its rapid growth.
That said, we need to understand the need for specific processes that must be
in place to ensure cloud computing success. Use of the CBO, Continuous Compliance and Continuous Cost Control solutions do not solve all issues with
moving to and managing enterprise cloud initiatives. However, they bring a
pragmatic approach to cloud computing that will speed deployment and simplify operations. At the same time, these concepts help you make the best decisions, optimize costs, and remain in compliance to ensure that your cloudbased solutions live on for many years.
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