Simply put, cloud cost optimization is a strategy for trimming costs for cloud technology usage, ensuring that you truly pay for only what you use. This approach relies on enterprises’ understanding of cloud technology needs and pricing systems to look for a way to optimize the usage and efficiency of cloud services, most cost-effectively.
This becomes imperative as the cloud infrastructure matures and becomes more complex in its structure. These complexities – multi-cloud deployment, for instance – can make costs more opaque and harder to track. When you can’t monitor and manage usage appropriately, you run the risk of costs spiraling out of control.
Cloud costs today may be determined by a lot of variables – virtual machine instances, network traffic, software licenses, training and support, web services, storage, and memory, to name a few. These variables may not be included in the upfront cost, which can contribute to a surge in your cloud cost.
Besides, cloud operations and the ensuing costs – are essentially fluid in nature and often managed in a decentralized manner, which makes tracking expenses more complex.
It is, therefore, crucial for enterprises to chart out a cloud cost optimization strategy that takes all these factors into account to get the most out of the infrastructure in place at minimal costs.