The tech industry is not having a great time at the moment. The 5 US tech giants – Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta, and Amazon – have reported losses in 2022 for the first time in years, and announced massive job layoffs. Of course, they’re by no means going bankrupt, still having earned a combined $243 billion, but seeing as this figure is slightly lower than in 2021, this is sending executives (and the tech industry as a whole) into panic mode (as if it’s not at all a sign of people getting fed up with living in late-stage capitalism).
With major companies bringing back efficiency and profitability, more and more businesses are talking about squeezing budgets in light of the cost of living crisis and the slowing global economy. If you’re considering cutting excess weight in your spreadsheets, here’s a suggestion – why not take a look at your cloud spending?
If 2023 is supposed to be “the year of efficiency”, optimizing your cloud usage is one to start. Not only do cloud costs make up almost 41% of the IT budget according to Gartner – meaning cutting it would make a real difference to your overall finances – in most cases, a lot of the cloud ends up being wasted. Our founder Benjamin Brial has written on the subject of cloud waste before, but the TL:DR is this: despite the cost of the cloud going down, companies’ spending on it has doubled in the last few years, with over $26 billion wasted on inefficient cloud usage. For a hyper-efficient IT world, it’s terribly below the mark.
If any of this rings true, don’t despair – there are ways to cut your spending and optimize cloud usage.
Get good FinOps software to track your costs
One of the reasons cloud spending keeps rising is the fact that cloud costs are shrouded in complexity and mystery, and traditional ways of monitoring them just don’t cut it anymore. Tracking with spreadsheets can get really complicated really fast while chasing data around multiple cloud cost management solutions across your cloud providers is already unnecessarily complex and can mask the real culprits.
What you must be looking for in a FinOps tool is the level of data granularity. You must be able to see the cost breakdown by project, region, provider, date range, or even team, to identify blindspots and money suckers, which would normally be overlooked.
Centralization and ease of access also play a part: the faster you can get a bird’s eye view of your cloud usage, the easier it is to correct course in case of errors. Marketing departments have ruined the word “holistic” for the world, but it’s exactly what you should be aiming for because getting the big picture, trends, and predictions for cloud resources can be the real missing piece to your financial strategy.
This is perhaps where we could plug our own FinOps module Cloud Cost Management, which does all of the above, but the consumer choice is really up to you – we can only advise on what to look out for.
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