05/21/2019

Three Strategies to Keep Cloud Spending In Check

Understanding why it costs so much

Cloud computing is increasingly important to how modern organizations work. Among its many attributes, the cloud is often touted as  a great way to save money on functions that were previously handled in-house. But if you’ve looked at your bill from Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, or another service lately, you may have wondered, “Why does this cost so much?”

Long story short: You may not be using your cloud offerings in the most efficient way possible. That’s the bad news. The good news is that there are things you can do to optimize your association’s cloud spending. A few examples:

Get a better understanding of your bill. When you’re literally paying by the bit, odds are good that the detailed bills you get are going to be confusing. A recent CIO piece cited the example of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider AvePoint, which found its bill so confusing that it actually built its own cost management tool—and ended up cutting its monthly costs by more than a third. “We wanted to know if our spend aligned with the revenue targets of our organization,” said John Hodges, the firm’s vice president of product strategy, in comments to the magazine. “That’s a surprisingly hard question for many cloud vendors to answer when their quarterly or month-to-month bills arrive.”

Please select this link to read the complete article from Associations Now.