Rule No. 1 Never lose money.
Rule No. 2 Never forget rule No. 1
-Warren Buffet
The benefits of flexibility and scalability are abundant when your IT department deploys your servers into a virtual cloud setting.
When running at optimal efficiency, this type of infrastructure can provide your company with unexpected improvements over your old on-site servers. Increased agility, increased physical and operational security, along with statistically less downtime can add to the list of benefits.
For most companies, the “big move” to the cloud is all about a better allocation of assets.
Saving money with virtual cloud servers starts with the relief of not having to shell out thousands of dollars in capital spend for equipment and space to house and maintain it.
After that, the regular monthly savings will come typically from personnel watching the resource consumption over time and attempting to gauge or predict future usage.
Unfortunately, this is where cloud can get complicated. Today, companies are stuck with inaccurate forecasts and very time consuming methods to calculate costs and usage mid-stream. The end result is wasted time and unexpected costs that aren’t seen until the bill is delivered a month later.
Gone are the days of the good ol’ guesstimate.
However, with the addition of “real time” cloud monitoring to an Amazon AWS deployment, companies can easily see how resources are being used, and the cost of those resources, with up-to-the-minute metrics that allow for a more informed and efficient cloud management process.
And now that you no longer have to try to balance cloud costs blindly, you can do the following three things better…
1. This little piggy went we-we-we all the way to the bank
If a certain part of your system (or a certain department) is “hogging” cloud services or driving up costs, it is clearly visible. This type of insight helps IT ask the right questions, like “ Is this an area we are wasting resources?” or “Is this additional cost justified?” Real-time monitoring and alerting lets you have this conversation immediately, before costs escalate out of control. The other option is to wait for the end of the month bill and then let the arguments (and firings) begin…
2. When in need, it’s allocation indeed
With plain view of your metrics, maybe it’s the other way around. You can ask questions like: “Is this something we’ve neglected in the past, but is obviously a big part of our business?”, “Should we invest more in this part of our business?” or “Is the additional cloud cost of this project/application/department justified?”.
3. Your own cloud cost management crystal ball
With this data, you can now predict what resources you’ll use more. You can also accurately predict your monthly cloud costs quickly and easily. It will make your executives happy and keep the CFO off your back.
In conclusion, it’s this “Zen-like” balance between cost and performance that you’ll need to find. Without truly understanding the cost side of that equation, you’re forever guessing and off-balance. How long can you keep that up and still hope to be successful?
As the conclusion to my 3 part Cost of Cloud Follow-up (
As a follow-up to my 
