Here Is How You Get Cloud Costs Under Control

Budgeting your IT department might make you feel like a circus performer. You have to balance so many resources on a razor’s edge. It can be stressful, and there’s a serious risk of hurting the company’s bottom line if you get it wrong. One way a lot of companies try to get ahead of this balancing act is by investing in the cloud.

If you outsource IT, it becomes someone else’s problem, but that isn’t always the most cost-effective route. If you want the power to accurately discern when and where you should turn to the cloud, you need cloud expense management. It’s a system that helps you put everything in perspective and compare costs. It’s the key to getting cloud costs under control, and it can help you by performing four important tasks.

Analyze Provisioning

It’s shockingly easy to pay for more cloud services than you really need. A huge source of overpaying stems from the disjointed arrangement of costs and services that is so common with cloud providers. Here’s an example: storage is often billed separately from instances. A cloud expense management system will take these disjointed costs and put them together. The improved transparency will make it easy to see exactly what you are paying and receiving for those payments. It’s the first step to managing cloud costs and ensuring that you’re getting a positive return on your investments.

Audit Your IT Infrastructure

Getting provisioning right is an important first step, but if you truly want to optimize cloud spending, you have to dive deeper. Essentially, decisions in cloud investment boil down to a single comparison. Is it more cost-effective to manage an IT service yourself or outsource it to the cloud?

Answering this question requires an audit of your IT infrastructure. You need to know what you have and how much it would cost to expand in any direction your business might lead. Once you have those numbers, comparing internal IT investments to cloud investments is completely straightforward.

Automate Invoicing

Cost analysis might represent the major expenses of cloud investments, but it’s not the whole picture. There are plenty of other avenues for saving money, and one of those is in invoicing. This is a universal issue — not something specific to cloud costs. Invoicing is complicated, and human beings make mistakes. When human error is directly attached to invoicing, it can corrupt your financial data. The potential problems are massive, to say the least.

Automating the invoicing process limits human error the guarantee that you have the right numbers in the right places. This is all obvious, but you might not know that cloud expense management systems can include automated invoicing for cloud expenses. You get this opportunity to save money baked into the package.

Reap the Benefits of Streamlined Cloud Services

The entire reason to invest in the cloud is to improve your bottom line. It’s supposed to save money and improve workflows. When you have cloud expense management ensuring that you are cost-effective, you can freely enjoy the workflow benefits of your cloud spending. You can sit back and watch your business grow as a result of smart investing.

A good cloud expense management system can do a lot of good for any business. You may have just learned the basics of how such systems work, but there’s plenty more to offer. Take a few minutes to get to know cloud expense management a little more intimately. It could be everything you need.

 ABOUT THE AUTHOR: JEFF POIRIOR

Jeff brings 25 years of telecommunications and information technology management experience in voice and data networking, server support, and telephony and security; with a significant emphasis on customer service. Prior to joining Valicom, he was chief of the infrastructure support section for the Wisconsin Department of Transportation. Jeff was the vice president of operations for CC&N, overseeing telecommunications, help desk, data and desk side support services. Prior to that, he served as the associate director of technical resources for Covance, responsible for managing systems and network operations supporting 1700 users in Wisconsin and Virginia. He has also led data center operations at Magnetek Electric, supporting mainframe systems, client/server applications, telephony systems, and computer-aided design. Jeff holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Cardinal Stritch University and a master’s degree in business administration from University of Phoenix. In addition, Jeff is a past board member of the Wisconsin Telecommunication Association.