5 ways to control your public-cloud spend

Migration to the public cloud is taking place at a rapid pace worldwide as organizations realize how a multicloud strategy can help them scale their businesses on-demand.

The technology can change your organization for the better by making it easier for you to react to changing market conditions, fast.

However, there are dangers to forging ahead with cloud migration without giving due consideration to aspects of your organization that may keep you from reaping the full benefits of a cloud strategy.

Here are five ways to optimize your public-cloud spending when adopting a multicloud strategy:

1. Involve your whole organization

A public-cloud strategy doesn’t belong to a single team or department. Implementing the right processes and frameworks requires the involvement of a range of disciplines and teams within your organization, such as product management, governance, operations and finance.

2. Actively monitor your cloud asset usage

As you move your organization’s applications and data to the cloud, your IT environment becomes more complex. If you don’t monitor your usage of all the moving parts to see where you could optimize your cloud setup, your costs can easily spiral out of control.

3. Prioritize informed budgeting

To avoid breaking your projected budget in a multicloud environment, you need to invest in consistent cost-management practices. So-called “cloud resource sprawl”, where you have dramatically different billing details across cloud providers, can make budgeting a real challenge. If your team is not familiar with managing cloud resources, they may not be able to budget for and interpret cloud spending correctly.

4. Review your security

When you ramp up your cloud usage, you also increase the risk of security breaches that may lead to higher operational costs and other impacts. Benchmark your security posture against your cloud provider’s recommended framework – such as the Azure Security Benchmark (ASB) or the Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmark – to understand any gaps in your cloud framework.

5. Set a baseline

There are tools that can help you manage your public-cloud spending, but such cost management becomes meaningless if you don’t achieve the desired changes in your organization.

If you don’t set a baseline before you embark on your cloud strategy, you won’t have a clear view of the cost-saving opportunities and cloud-management needs that will arise. Creating a baseline gives you an opportunity not only to drive efficient consumption of information technology but also to bring immediate and tangible financial benefits to your organization.

The best way to address this is by assessing your public-cloud spending to probe your current state, policies and spending and see how you can optimize your cloud spending and cost management.

Book a meeting with NTT to complete our Public-Cloud Spend Assessment.

Tim Cavill is Senior Vice President, Managed Services Go-to-Market (Asia Pacific) at NTT