One of the main reasons why businesses adopt cloud technology is to reduce costs. However, it often happens that when they conduct an audit, they discover they are paying for a lot of cloud resources that are not being efficiently used.
The challenge then becomes how to track the cloud costs and ensure that these resources are being used appropriately and that the organisation isn’t over-provisioning.
To unpack the immediate and tangible financial benefits that the efficient use of cloud services can offer, Kevin Kemp, senior account manager, Micro Focus South Africa, will be presenting a keynote address on “Tracking your cloud costs throughout the various vendors you are dealing with,” at The ITWeb Cloud & Data Centre Summit 2022 to be held at The Capital on the Park, on 1 November.
He says many companies believe they are not getting a good enough ROI from their cloud investments because they lack the right process or toolsets to control and manage their cloud spending. In addition, they have no proactive planning in place to reduce costs, such as they don’t take advantage of the discounts offered by the cloud vendor.
When it comes to reducing the complexity of managing costs in multi-cloud environments, Kemp says organisations should look to implement FinOps best practices to bring discipline to managing the cloud budget. Part of this is identifying and enforcing the FinOps tools that can reduce the cost and bring visibility into cloud spend, in near real-time.
When asked how companies can ensure vendors are accountable for what they spend, he says they need to charge back or invoice with granular line items (such as shared cost, amortisation, and indirect cost).
“Not one single vendor provides all the line items in the chargeback but they provide tools like Athena (a server-less, interactive query service to query data and analyse big data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL) for the customer to query the line items and enrich the chargeback data.
Delegates attending Kemp’s keynote will hear how to identify the right solutions to manage and optimise public cloud IaaS and PaaS costs, and how to ensure all cloud consumers are accountable for what they spend. They will also learn about cloud cost optimisation best practices, and the importance of harnessing cloud cost management.
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