Managing & Optimizing Costs of Public Cloud IaaS & PaaS

Cloud Cost Management is an Enterprise-Wide Responsibility

In this research, Gartner provides advice on how enterprises can more efficiently leverage IaaS (infrastructure as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service) infrastructure by making cloud cost management a cross-functional responsibility.

Gartner reveals and recommends that:

• Enterprises must prioritize hybrid cloud optimization, and in cases where they do, and with proper preparation, they can reap significant financial and performance benefits
• Cloud cost management is, in reality, a cross-functional concern and priority, shared by governance, architecture, operations (Ops), product management (PM), finance, and app engineering
• Cloud cost management must be achieved in tandem with—and not at the cost of—other business priorities and goals, and should be tied to operational key performance indicators (KPIs) of both infrastructure managers and cloud consumers within the enterprise
• Application owners and other cloud consumers across the business should be provided with adequate cost reporting so they can share accountability for ownership with operations
• Businesses should leverage resource tagging and other infrastructure organization techniques to tie cloud to apps, departments, and budgetary cost centers
• Enterprises should employ analytics to help:
  1. Drive instance rightsizing to reap meaningful cloud cost savings
  2. Inform purchasing strategies (making use of discount plans like AWS Savings Plans, Amazon Reserved Instances, and Google committed use discounts) to optimize spend
  3. Select the latest provider instance types and offerings to optimize resource usage
• Companies should make full use of public cloud provider cost optimization tools, and argument these built-in offerings with independent, intelligent, cross-platform solutions like Densify

Read the Gartner Research