Reduce the time to market and improve your innovation speed by getting the most value out of your cloud spend.
Just do it! Nothing more!
But with the easiness of clicking some new functionalities together in public cloud and bring them up and running, you need to organize your cloud governance, including your cost control.
After reading this article you will know more details about how to be successful in controlling your costs with cloud governance.
What is Cloud governance?
Cloud governance encompasses the system and mechanisms by which an organization is controlled and operates, and its people, are held to account in relation to their cloud usage.
What is cost management within Cloud governance?
Cost management within cloud governance is the process of managing the costs of the public cloud in relation to business outcomes.
Why do you need cloud governance?
Public cloud brings an enormous opportunity to improve the time-to-market, innovation, security, etc. of your business. With a few clicks, you have some new functionality up and running. But with these few clicks are also some side effects, risks, like costs, security, etc. that need to be managed.
Cloud governance takes care of managing everything that is needed to get the most value out of your cloud spend.
How to set up cost control for Cloud Governance?
It is all about the details. In the above paragraphs, you have already read some important topics which should be taken into account to set up successful cost management for cloud governance. Below you can read some more details about these topics.
People
It’s a no-brainer that you need your people to achieve the business goals. Cloud governance is about giving your people the responsibility to manage the cloud cost that they use. Giving is not enough. You need to coach them, facilitate them with the right tools, see also our blog about finops solutions, and also let them report so you can give them compliments if possible.
Business outcomes
Cost management and – cutting won’t be successful if you only focus on the costs part. You should focus on the business outcome of these costs. Making (acceptable) costs for something that delivers a lot of business value isn’t bad. To achieve this you need to have a clear focus on what you want to achieve with the right key performance indicators. Tagging the cloud costs to specific business goals, – projects is the way to do this. Many companies struggle to make their cloud cost transparent. The native (AWS, Azure, GCP) cost management solutions are often not sufficient to support the business.
Top and bottom line
Like in the above paragraphs mentioned your people will get the responsibility to manage their cloud costs. Also, your people can and will act more in line with the business goals if they know the outcome of their activities. Reporting only about cloud costs is not enough. Reporting about their cloud costs in relation to the top – and bottom line will give them the context they need.
Cloud cost governance tools
To make all the above happen you need to have the right cloud cost governance tools. The right tools to facilitate the business to be successful. These tools need to have:
- One single source of truth of the cloud costs data
- The possibility to give everyone access to the data that is needed
- A solution to import other non-public cloud business data
- The option to tag cloud costs to the desired business goals (entities).
That’s how you control your cost with Cloud governance!