Cloud computing may be the most exciting technological innovation of the 21st century. It has been adopted more quickly than other technologies in this field.  Especially, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud have become the new norm for enterprises today. Cloud computing remains one of the fastest-growing segments of IT spending in every sector. For CIO’s it is a huge responsibility to allocate cloud budgets wisely, since higher the spending, greater is the impact if things go haywire.

According to Gartner, it is expected that by 2024, nearly all legacy applications that migrate to the cloud will require optimization to make them more cost-efficient.

To deep dive further, public cloud offers several benefits, including agility, flexibility, scalability, and ease of administration, however there is a risk of overspending. Many organizations often over allocate resources to a workload knowing or unknowingly. The customers will likely experience this when transitioning from on-premises cost (CapEx) models to cloud-based operational expenditure (OpEx) models. It would often apply to cloud-based applications furthermore.

Speaking of Azure Cost Management, it continues to improve the native optimization capabilities of cloud solutions to enable organizations to choose the most cost-effective architecture that can deliver the required performance.

Azure Cost Management and Optimization: Challenges, Strategy and Approach

The idea behind cloud cost management (also called cloud cost optimization) is to manage your Azure expenses efficiently. It involves understanding your Azure spends and reducing cloud waste. Azure cost optimization is vital because you want to maximize the benefits of your cloud investment and achieve your business goals at the lowest possible cost. There are numerous expenses to manage, including compute, storage, network traffic, software licenses, web services and support.

Many businesses use the cloud as the primary means of reducing costs, so this is a major issue. In order to keep your Azure costs low and only pay for what your business needs, what's most important?

To further understand this, let’s begin with the challenges and organization faces during their cloud adoption journey.

Cloud Cost Management Challenges

There are many advantages of a cloud infrastructure for enterprises, but there are also challenges. The advantages of security, scalability, and control are straightforward. It is equally important to understand how cloud technology impacts your business - in this case, Azure cost is vital.

Despite the rush to cloud, organizations struggle to control Azure spending. It has become easier to deploy and use services in Azure, but this self-service model also makes it very easy to overspend. Therefore, organizations are realizing they must optimize their Azure spend and eliminate waste.

Cloud cost management presents the following challenges:

  • Making purchasing decisions
  • Using right policies to avoid anomalies
  • Cloud cost accountability and saving potential
  • Cost transparency to all stakeholders
  • Tools and dashboards to use for improving visibility and analysis
  • Making a collaborative experience of capturing ideas, discussion and actionable

Cloud Cost Management Strategies

A systematic approach to cost management should be taken before investing in Azure cloud services to mitigate challenges. As a result, organizations must create a vision, strategy, and plan to manage and optimize Azure costs, as well as put in place the right tools and processes to manage and optimize ongoing Azure spending.

Finance teams across the world are now sharpening their pencils in response to COVID-19 and looking more aggressively at such measures.

With a holistic view on the importance of cost management, Tech Mahindra consider the following to best manage growing cloud cost:

  • Invest in the right tools to succeed
  • Accountability regarding costs
  • Optimize spending by taking appropriate action

Tech Mahindra’s Approach in Addressing Cost Management Challenges

Tech Mahindra has deep industry and system integrator experience for over 22 years. With our strong alliance ecosystem, we help deliver comprehensive solutions tailored to the unique business needs of our clients.

Tech Mahindra’s FinOps service is a strategic and tactical services for Azure Cloud Cost Management and Optimization. It can help organization to take back control of spiraling cloud spend and enforcing the reduction of cloud cost.

Using Tech Mahindra’s FinOps service, applications may be run within the cloud at all-time low possible cost to produce the specified business outcomes. Cloud spending will be reduced by utilizing cloud resources effectively and taking advantage of the tools and guidance provided by Tech Mahindra’s FinOps service.

Conclusion

Although Microsoft Azure has proven to be a cost-effective IT solution, there are many ways that Azure cost can rise over time. Implementing the right tools and processes to manage your costs will allow you to avoid costly surprises in the future and help your business succeed.

As a way to overcome this challenge, Tech Mahindra’s FinOps framework enables clients to gain visibility into costs as well as optimize their Azure expenses without compromising availability, performance and flexibility of your mission critical applications on Azure.

About the Author

Mr. Madhusudhanan Vasu, Global Practice Head Cloud and Platforms

Madhusudan is an experienced Head of Infrastructure with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry. He is a strong information technology professional skilled in global delivery, IT strategy, data center, management, presales, and cloud.

Mr. Guru Prasad C P; Group Practice Head, Azure Cloud Services

Guru Prasad C P has an experience of over 22 years with over 8 years specifically in the public cloud  domain working in Asia, ANZ, Europe and the US. His experience includes, setting up practice teams aligned to industry verticals and horizontals, analyst interactions for positioning the offerings, hiring the right talent, involving in strategic exercise mergers and acquisitions, organization building, creating frameworks and IP’s. At Tech Mahindra he is responsible for practice and competency development which includes alignment with OEMs for solutions, offerings and adoption of new technologies, customer interfacing where he acts as a trusted advisor in providing unbiased views/opinions and aligning with organization goals at the same time, value creation, developing practice areas deal making, solution support for large deals, and carve out deals from azure and hybrid cloud perspective.

Mr. Karthikeyan Kannan, Principal Solution Architect (Cloud Cost Optimization)

Karthikeyan Kannan is a Principal Solutions Architect at Tech Mahindra. He is a skilled professional with over  19 years of experience in designing and architecting Azure applications, migrations, and cost optimization. Over the years, he has worked with clients in the investment banking, healthcare, insurance, oil and gas, telecom, and transportation industries. His expertise includes networking, virtualization, identity, security, business continuity, disaster recovery, data platforms and governance. He is skilled in PowerShell.