Usually, for every dollar spent on infrastructure upgrades, organizations can expect to spend approximately $2 on managing, maintaining and securing the extended infrastructure. If you’re a Microsoft Office user, the best value in cloud storage is the Microsoft 365 Personal plan. In addition to a terabyte of cloud storage in OneDrive, you receive fully-featured versions of Office for your PC, Mac, and mobile devices. This includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, plus Access and Publisher on Windows only. Meanwhile, several other services, including OneDrive (via Microsoft 365 Basic) and iCloud, offer 100GB or 200GB plans at the same price point.

• As organizations ascend to the cloud, their cloud expenses are floating to the same lofty heights.
• Cloud cost optimization ensures the most appropriate and cost efficient cloud resources are allocated to each workload or application.
• A cloud application is usually architected from multiple cloud services, such as virtual machines, storage platforms and databases.
• Each of these roles needs the right level of reporting for showback, or integration with finance tools for chargeback, to expose them to the financial impact of the decisions they’re making.
• This would result in four types of clouds; public clouds, private clouds, hybrid clouds, and community clouds [30, 42].

It requires a culture change and participation across engineering, operations, executives, finance and business managers. Each of these roles needs the right level of reporting for showback, or integration with finance tools for chargeback, to expose them to the financial impact of the decisions they’re making. Pump has quickly gained more than 200 customers and is still expanding.

Three Cloud Financial Management Strategies

For example; supply-chain or procurement department should collaborate with IT and design a new process for evaluating cloud providers. According to consultancy side experts, a caliber from supply chain should engage in reviewing the contracts and periodically reviewing the performance of the cloud vendor in compliance with the SLA. Rapid provision of cloud services, with minimal management efforts, have largely motivated for customers to adopt cloud [24, 28].

Next thing you know, these hidden costs start adding up and become a significant financial risk. Although three-quarters of IT leaders say they’re skilled at understanding cloud costs and usage, according to research by cloud optimisation firm Virtana, this isn’t borne out by the evidence. Some IT folks simply fail to understand the implications of their cloud resources. Surprisingly, a recent survey by SoftwareONE revealed that 30% don’t realize that everything in the cloud is metered. To rectify this knowledge gap, organizations could use better awareness into their cloud holdings. Achieving effective cloud cost controls requires an intentional approach to cost optimization, one that targets the right metrics in adherence with best practices.

Google Cloud pricing

From the cloud customer perspective, the customer is neither ready for contract management nor fully aware of the contracted subject. Contracts are put to govern a technology that is evolving and agile by nature. In the case study of this paper, the CIO explained that they had a problem to properly size the contracted service.

They highlighted that this point is underestimated by cloud customers, and disguised by cloud vendors. For example, cloud not only asks for new employees, but also deletes some roles in IT department. As well, infrastructure, hardware caliber can not easily act as cloud specialists. Change, according to the consultants, has to be planned and managed. With Citrix, it’s easy to adopt cloud services based on what works best for your business. This flexibility allows organizations to scale quickly, making it possible to securely support hundreds or thousands of securely—on any device and from any location.

If you need an absolutely massive amount of cloud storage space, the cheapest cloud storage you’ll find is on MEGA.nz. This longtime cloud storage service was once known for offering 50GB of free space. While it no longer has this perk, it does offer the best value at high storage tiers. As mentioned, Google provides storage upgrades through its Google One program; you don’t buy it through Google Drive directly.

The process is getting trickier and asks for new cloud/finance caliber. Such services that emerge because of the move to the cloud can be termed Meta service, by which we mean cloud services that manage cloud services. For example, Azure-costs.com is a cloud service to manage Microsoft Azure cloud services. There are many other similar services and dedicated IT companies emerging and building their business models only on selling these meta services. The cloud makes a big budget item for every modern organization in the post-pandemic world.

This number was sufficient because we reached a point where more interviews did not add something new to the findings. The case study is a 2000-employees company operating in 10 countries. It has a portfolio of cloud services cloud cost management including, SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. Armbrust et al. [4] disagree to articulate the different services delivered by cloud computing providers. They reason this to the lack of coherent dissimilarities between those services.

Keep in mind that these fees are calculated based on each month’s charges, so your support pricing could differ from month to month. A basic support plan is included with your AWS services, but it only covers billing support and service limit increases. So it might be a good idea to purchase a premium support plan for more advanced support. A significant disadvantage of RIs is that you’ll pay for the reserved capacity whether you use it or not. Moreover, as is the case with Savings Plans, making a long-term commitment could be a drawback.