Three ways to uncover hidden cloud fees and save

Hide and seek isn’t fun and games when it involves your organization’s spending. Identifying your hidden cloud fees can give you a tremendous business advantage.

Hidden cloud fees are a hot topic at the moment. Taking action to discover these fees can help you avoid cost sprawl. Historically, this wasn’t a major consideration because traditional infrastructure, with its in-house or an outsourced IT team, provided maintenance, optimization, upgrade and support. Such teams had full control of the environment and operated on a somewhat finite budget.

But what happens when you move to the cloud? After all, it’s easy to scale, immutable and elastic. It’s music to the ears of the lines of business as they don’t have to wait days, weeks or even months for IT to spin up servers. Instead, they have the autonomy to stand up services once organizational landing zones are established, with the click of a button.

That’s a major advantage for business innovation. However, cloud fees can more easily accrue without notice if organizational governance mechanisms are not established. For example, teams can spin up flexible dev, QA and UAT environments. However, without governance, this can lead to sprawl if they do not turn off services when they are no longer being used.

Hidden cloud fees can lead to significant waste in cloud spending. Containing costs with a cloud FinOps framework is a way to limit this loss. Technology can go a long way in resolving the issue, but it also involves people and processes. In this blog post, I’ll explore strategies for unearthing and preventing hidden cloud fees.

#1: Implement governance practices

A critical component of controlling costs is governance. With governance practices, you can avoid the costly risk of violating regulations. That involves setting up structured, role-based limitations to which data and files can be accessed by whom. Any unauthorized attempt to increase cloud spending will trigger an alert to an employee’s manager, who can then question why the additional spend is needed. 

While every employee is responsible for exercising fiscal care, how much is spent ultimately falls on leadership. The financial operations folks and executives must be carefully attuned to the cloud investment and communicate their priorities and limitations to employees. 

Effective governance tools let you detect underutilized cloud resources and automate waste elimination. This can inform decision-making on savings plans, reserved instances and committed use discounts. 

#2: Budget your total cloud spend 

Contain cost sprawl by implementing the guardrails of a total cloud budget. To keep costs within these financial boundaries, all managers with purchasing authority must be informed of this total infrastructure allotment. At the same time, your IT team needs visibility on all the cloud investments being made within the individual business units or departments.

It's about finding balance. You don’t want to stifle innovation because of financial operations. At the same time, comprehensive awareness of spending is critical to optimize the amount of innovating your organization can do. One way to gain this awareness is with a product cataloging system that tracks all cloud subscriptions throughout the organization. This is table stakes for big enterprises, providing a spigot to turn investments on or off so spending doesn’t get unwieldy.

With proactive monitoring and dashboard reporting, you can review and manage your cloud infrastructure, including containers, virtual machines and serverless functions. Tagging infrastructure components can map where spending is going and who’s using which applications and services.

#3: Plan your cloud spending strategy 

To prevent costs from spiraling, you must have a plan in place to align your cloud strategy with your business objectives. Document the processes for controlling costs, strategies for mitigating risk, and the architecture and tooling used.

Your plan should include:

• Cloud spending buckets 
• Reporting you’ll implement to track every component of your plan 
• Monitoring tools and other technologies used to track spending 
• Stakeholder responsibilities to help contain cloud costs 

While this blog post is focused on detecting hidden cloud fees, these strategies will help you answer other questions about where your cloud dollars are going. One major challenge is overprovisioning, when you pay for more virtual machines and instances than you use. About 40% of instances are at least one size larger than required. And you could be paying for unused subscriptions, leading to significant wasted expenses. Hybrid and multi-cloud environments complicate this further but the right strategy will account for that.

Find your hidden cloud fees. 

Ultimately, FinOps is a business play. Implementing governance practices, establishing a budget and developing a plan can help keep cloud spending under control and reduce the possibility of hidden cloud fees. And if you’re seeking a technology solution to detect spending issues, evaluate spending trends and identify opportunities to cut costs, explore Unisys Cloud Financial Analysis and Optimization.