Creating a Cost-Conscious Culture that Reduces Public Cloud Spend

In 2021, 39% of organizations reported that they overspent their cloud budget. And the larger the organization’s cloud budget, the more likely they were to overspend. (Almost half of companies who budgeted $2-$10 million on the cloud overspent.)

But that’s not even the kicker… for the majority of those organizations, that stat isn’t a surprise,  but an expected and projected outcome. Two-thirds of survey respondents said they expected to bust their cloud budgets last year.

So, how can organizations stop themselves from having to budget for cloud overspend? Only one of two ways: use fewer resources or pay less for them.

The Focus on a Cost-Conscious Culture

Given the urgent need to cut cloud spend, it should come as no surprise that cloud financial management is quickly becoming a mainstream practice in large orgs across all sizes of cloud spend. Many organizations are actually driving a cost-conscious culture from the ground up by setting up dedicated FinOps teams within the org — a cloud financial management discipline that focuses on getting maximum business value by helping engineering, finance, technology and business teams collaborate on data-driven spending decisions.

Yet, while AWS does offer a number of deals to help cut costs, like reserved instances, committed spending, spot or preemptible virtual machines, etc., only 12% percent of practitioners focused on FinOps managed to actually automate the use of these savings plans.

So, what are the remaining challenges of bringing order to the chaos of cloud cost management that even mature FinOps teams are having trouble solving?

The responses were similar across beginner and mature FinOps practitioners alike:

• "We need accurate forecasting" (26% of respondents)
• "We need to reduce waste / get rid of unused resources (24%)
• "We need our engineers to consider spend and take action on cost optimization as a priority" (39%)
  

I don’t know about you, but those kind of look like the same challenges that a lot of cloud-based organizations solve, no matter the size or FinOps resources.

And thankfully, the solutions for solving these challenges are the same across the board, also.

How To Reduce Spend With or Without FinOps

The challenge of reducing monthly cloud spend can be solved in three phases:

1. Have clear visibility into your environment and resource usage
2. Optimize your costs and opportunities
3. Empower your team to measure efficiency and optimize as needed
   

Sure, this sounds easier said than done. But with Tenacity, it really is that easy…

Our platform provides FinOps teams and cloud security teams alike a single source of truth for their cloud optimization and spend. 

For FinOps teams looking to create accurate forecasting and clean up their cloud waste, Tenacity can break down and filter your cloud cost view as needed, forecast your spend in order to create budgets, and give you detailed spending analysis and cost savings strategies from your unique business context that will help you spot where you can reduce your monthly cloud bill in minutes.

For mid-size organizations who are looking to understand their cloud usage and costs across multiple cloud platforms without FinOps resources, Tenacity can help aggregate your data so you can actually see what's happening across all of AWS, Azure, or both in one single platform, and actually take action on it thanks to prioritize alerts. “Here are the 5 things you need to worry about right now. Here are the 5 things that you should prioritize next. And here are 5 things you can figure out later.”

That's not marketing speak or a sales pitch... it really is that easy.

Ready to see the cloud cost savings that are in your future? Head to TenacityCloud.com and click ‘Sign Up’ and your detailed savings analysis will begin populating without you ever having to set a meeting or talk to a sales person.