Are those á la carte fees with your public cloud bill adding up?

How you can manage your cloud spend

Over the years, buying an all-inclusive airfare has been replaced with an á la carte pricing experience, making air travel feel a lot more expensive and stressful. Beyond the cost of flying coach, there’s the extra fee for a checked bag, the fees for in-flight snacks and entertainment, a fee for that seat with extra legroom, the fee for an overweight bag, and so on. Airlines are banking on every passenger paying for all those unexpected add-ons.

A very clear analogy can be tied to the cost of your public cloud. Have you seen your public cloud bill lately? Most likely not. Unbeknownst to many, public cloud service providers are ringing up every possible interaction a company has with its data. Cloud service providers like AWS or Azure will charge you to process your data, store it, move it and protect it. Weighed down by their enormous cloud bills, companies are being metered to death. In my view, these unexpected add-ons are simply too large to ignore.

Fortunately there’s a smarter way to manage your cloud spend and savvy companies are changing course. Companies are incrementally lifting and shifting their mission-critical workloads to an open-source cloud environment that simplifies and optimizes the cloud for their customers.

To lower cloud costs, a system architect can peel back the onion to understand where data egress fees are being incurred and engage in a cloud assessment to eliminate them. When faced with lack of control, unforeseen costs, lack of understanding or unpredictability of costs, every organization should consider switching to a cloud model where you get full transparency, price predictability and exceptional performance.

Companies need to add the costs of meeting compliance and regulatory requirements to their calculus. The long-term costs to meeting the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) or the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) can balloon over time because addressing their complex requirements often present unexpected charges. Working with an open-source cloud service provider that readily meets these requirements can simplify compliance and protect your resources and reputation.

If you have mission-critical workloads that require security and performance, then shifting them to a hardened security cloud environment makes technical and financial sense. ORock Strata with Lockheed Martin Hardened Security for Intel® Processors is such a solution. It’s a next-generation hardened security solution for mission-critical workloads and applications in the cloud and it delivers greater security, faster performance and predictable pricing.

Manage Your Cloud Spend With a Cloud Assessment

One way to achieve lower cost of ownership is to partner with a cloud team that offers managed services and support. During a system crisis, too many companies have to wait a full day or three to get a call returned, essentially grinding productivity to a halt. Personalized support turns that equation around, saving a company critical time and money and allowing it to focus on growing the business.

Perhaps this can all be boiled down to a simple point. Sometimes it can be advantageous to take the road less traveled and boost your cloud environment in the process. In the coming weeks, take the time to thoroughly evaluate your public cloud spend and decide if it’s still working for you or not. You’ll be glad you did.

If you would like to get help understanding and reducing your cloud spend, we have a free cloud assessment that can analyze your AWS or Azure invoice for price savings and performance enhancements.