Managing your Rising Cloud Spend the Smart way

With higher data centre costs here to stay, can you afford not to? Data centre costs continue to rise and rise. Many organisations have been hit with double digit increases in costs this year alone. However, customers internal and external, are not tempering their expectations in terms of access to truly transformative IT services.

CIOs are forced to take the magnifying glass to cloud spend. But it can very quickly become opaque thanks to shadow IT, a failure to right-size cloud infrastructure from the outset, or unknowingly contracting excess compute or storage capacity.

“Cloud overspend is not uncommon,” according to Andrea Wallace, director of Ireland with Unifii, a ServiceNow partner”.

“Organisations that are unable to track and monitor cloud costs overspend by an average of 40 per cent according to market analyst, Gartner and that’s something, which we also see with some of our Irish clients. Organisations need granular visibility and control to be able to streamline cloud costs but they can’t always access the necessary operational reporting to provide this,” she said.

Reducing cloud costs starts with effective IT asset discovery, which helps organisations to understand the data that drives an accurate view of their past, present and future. This includes looking at operating systems, deployments that involve virtualisation and cloud instances in public, private or hybrid cloud environments.

A single-platform solution such as ServiceNow facilitates this and provides a single pane of glass to manage hybrid cloud spending from one place.

The ServiceNow Cloud Insights module provides IT and finance with intuitive, interactive dashboards that identify cloud resources and break them down by cost centre, application, business service or other entity. It also provides recommendations on how to reduce cloud spend by automating repetitive, cost-optimisation costs. ServiceNow users can monitor resource provisioning as well as usage data levels with ease.

“There are lots of practical steps that IT professionals can take to cut cloud costs, but they need the tools to do so,” said Wallace.

“Switch off cloud resources for departments that operate on a 9am-5pm basis rather than leaving them running around the clock. Use ServiceNow automated workflows to identify under-used resources and optimise that spend.

“Budget your cloud spend with greater accuracy through the use of categories, to identify all levels of your costs and finally set budgets that are monitored and tracked on a more timely basis,” she said.

Unifii is a ServiceNow Elite partner that works with some of Ireland’s best-known brands across retail, food services and IT sectors. Andrea Wallace is the director of Ireland and she leads a team of in-country consultants who provide experience and expertise across ITSM, human resource management (HRM) and customer experience (CX).

(This article was originally published by Business Post on 24 September 2023. You can refer to it here.)