Cloud cost optimization: Don’t rely on vendor dashboards to get the job done

Can you use the data from your cloud service provider’s dashboard to reduce costs and enhance the utilization of your infrastructure resources? Sure, but it often demands substantial effort and doesn’t always deliver optimal results.

There’s a huge difference between cloud data transparency – simply seeing your services and costs – and true data observability that enables you to pinpoint the reasons for cost overruns and additional charge fees. Without a strategic cloud cost optimization framework like FinOps, the heavy lifting of analysis, insight, and the necessary follow-up actions fall on you to fuel improvements in expense and asset management. This issue spans the entire cloud arena: cloud infrastructure, software applications, and unified communications applications.

Keep reading for a deep dive into the issues of cloud visibility and what you can do about it. 

3 reasons service delivery dashboards fall short  

1. IaaS dashboards don’t tame runaway cloud costs
The cloud is how companies innovate, but public cloud infrastructure services are notorious for runaway costs – to the point that cloud service providers openly admit their invoices spin out of control. Almost 90% of IT decision makers agree they can’t get a solid view of their cloud costs quickly, and nearly 70% are unsure if they’re delivering the right service levels for their business needs.
If IT teams could get this meaningful insight from their raw data, they would. Current setups fall short of a comprehensive FinOps approach to cloud expense management.  

2. Private cloud dashboards lack the context of fully loaded costs
Looking to define the total costs of your private cloud architecture? Vendor dashboards don’t track the physical investments needed for private cloud operations, leaving teams to resort to manual processes prone to human errors. Consider the expenses related to both physical and virtual assets like virtual machines and servers, physical servers, and data centers (utilities, labor management costs, software licenses, etc.). Cloud cost optimization requires data observability across the entire cloud estate with a holistic view of both public and private cloud spend in one place. Knowing how private and public cloud costs compare to each other is increasingly important, as it often guides cost-conscious workload placement policies.

3. SaaS and UCaaS providers obscure the full picture 
SaaS vendors can’t help IT leaders ferret out challenges related to Shadow IT, a major issue in the cloud landscape in which employees make unsanctioned application purchases without the involvement of IT. Most companies are still paying for more tools than they need.

Meanwhile, when it comes to video conferencing and softphones it’s out of sight, out of mind – that is, until your invoice arrives. UCaaS providers commonly charge fees when clients exceed their allotted data usage, which is fair, but their invoices often lack detailed breakdowns. Once again, you’re left to dig into your dashboard to find the source(s) of these charges on your own. A lack of pre-built capabilities means you need to manually correlate multiple sources of data to arrive at the root cause. On top of this, it’s not uncommon to have missing contracts, users, and call detail records.

So, what is the best software for cloud cost optimization?

Ditch your vendor dashboard and do this instead

The only way to truly go from data transparency to data observability is with a purpose-built solution designed to help IT and finance leaders optimize cloud assets and control costs. This solution is a cloud expense management (CEM) platform.

Cloud expense management involves efficiently managing IT expenses and services to reduce cloud costs, maximize resource utilization, and enhance process efficiencies in financial management. A CEM platform provides a single source of truth for IT and finance teams to track, monitor, and optimize costs and service usage across their entire cloud estate including public cloud infrastructure, private cloud infrastructure, and cloud software applications– acting as an “easy button” for meaningful data observability that helps fuel cost efficiencies and digital innovation.

What cloud expense management platforms can do for you

• Build a highly integrated environment for multi-cloud optimization: Tapping into all major hyperscalers, cloud service providers, and hundreds of SaaS apps helps you get overarching views into your multi-cloud costs with visibility into expenses and any unused services, assets, and application licenses. This exposes where waste occurs – linking it to overage fees, charge details, spending trends, etc.
• Power cost optimizations with AI: CEM doesn’t just stop at data observability – you’ll also get AI-enabled recommendations for proactively avoiding expenses and improving utilization of purchased services. For example, consolidating duplicate SaaS tools and reallocating unused licenses, downgrading IaaS instances, leveraging discount opportunities, and repossessing or reassigning unused resources. Best yet, automatic implementation empowers IT and finance teams to immediately act on these recommendations with just the push of a button.
• Compare costs across multiple providers: Data normalization is one of the greatest issues preventing cloud cost governance. A CEM platform normalizes unstructured data across multiple vendors, from IaaS billing information and discounting models to service structures and usage data, so that meaningful comparisons can take place using unit costs.
• Simplify cost allocations: Accelerate chargeback processes with automated capabilities to hold departments and lines of business fiscally responsible for their cloud consumption.
• Get stakeholders on the same page: Build a culture of cloud cost optimization with custom reports that allow stakeholders and department leaders to recognize how decisions and purchases impact costs and budgets. Executives get overarching views while IT financial analysts can track every dollar.

There is a need for continued oversight and governance outside of default dashboards to mitigate risk. Cloud expense management tools and providers are best positioned to save companies a significant amount of time in unpacking the intricacies of siloed information and unstructured data, providing an unbiased view of cloud services and the most cost-effective path forward. 

Elevate your cloud cost optimization with Tangoe One Cloud, the AI-powered FinOps solution addressing SaaS, UCaaS, IaaS, and private cloud environments.