Why it isn’t easy to throw cloud spending on the cutting block: This was an interesting TechCrunch article on cutting cloud costs during a market downturn. Their insights and interviews with industry experts offer several important trends to keep in mind:
- Looking to cut unnecessary costs is always going to be worthwhile, regardless of external economic conditions.
- Layoffs are far harder to execute than cuts to public cloud spending in terms of internal message, external branding, and morale.
- When profits matter more and growth is harder to come by, cloud cost optimization projects are likely to be higher on the priority list.
As the title of the article suggests, making a significant dent in cloud costs just for the sake of cost cutting is easier said than done, especially for tech companies born in the cloud. “If you need the resources, you need them—there isn’t much you can do without shortchanging your business.” But, if you know or even suspect you are overspending or overprovisioning, prioritizing cloud cost optimization makes perfect sense right now.
The problem for many organizations, however, lies in knowing where, exactly, to make cuts in the cloud—and that’s something the article doesn’t address.
If you don’t know which engineering team, application, or service is responsible for which cloud costs, any attempt at cost cutting may end up doing more harm than good for the business. You need to be able to map all your cloud costs to your business priorities in order to say what’s profitable or necessary and can stay, and what’s a waste or unnecessary and can go.
Organizations that keep this contextualized cloud cost information readily available and always up to date will find they have greater agility and flexibility to adapt faster to changing market conditions—and to come out stronger on the other side.
Yotascale delivers unmatched visibility and attribution of cloud costs in the context of your business. Learn more about why that's so important.
