When IT services started moving to the cloud, we were all told costs would go down and controlling costs would be easier. Now we’re several years into that process, though, you might be experiencing the exact opposite. 

Cloud computing has transformed IT services. Centralized ITIL/ITSM-based service management is no longer the norm. Anyone with access to a budget can purchase a subscription or license. This fragments both your IT infrastructure and your cost management, possibly creating a situation where IT spending can easily go out of control. 

To optimize the cost of your cloud infrastructure, you need to take back control over spending, provisioning and management. Without sacrificing agility and your organization’s ability to execute on its mission. 

Can the cloud be more cost-effective than on-premise infrastructure? Absolutely. But to achieve this, you will need proper cost management, centralized subscription management and uniform guidelines for management and usage of subscriptions. 

Centralized buying reduces cost because of larger volumes and uniform configurations. Centrally implementing best practices, such as turning off the ‘OTA’ part of OTAP outside of office hours or replacing full virtual machines with Azure functions can also greatly reduce cost. 

Whether with subscription management, rationalization of existing workloads, cloud-native application design or cost control, we help market-leading companies tackle their cloud cost challenges. 

We have a lot of experience calculating and optimizing capacity and contract lengths, and we wrote the book on centralized management of Azure subscriptions for multinational companies like Heineken. We are working on a similar project for AWS. 

Our approach balances cost and operational needs by critically evaluating contract duration, challenging developers on their capacity needs and usage and temporarily turning off or cleaning up unused environments.