4 tips for making the most of your cloud costs

As Covid-19 continues to be felt across Latin America and around the world, many businesses face severe economic losses. According to IDG research on how IT leaders are responding to the pandemic, approximately 35% of information technology decision-makers expect their IT budgets to decrease in the next 12 months.

 One of the greatest benefits of running in the cloud is that you can scale up and down to meet demand and reduce operational spending ?— especially when facing unexpected changes. 

We at Google Cloud want to help. Based on learnings from working with some of our biggest customers, we’ve put together four best practices for managing cloud operating expenses. These tips and tools can help you rightsize cloud costs to meet your business needs in these challenging, unpredictable times.

1. Understand your costs so you can optimize spending. By understanding what your costs are, you can more easily make adjustments as needed. Proactively organize and structure your costs so you can have a clear view of what you’re spending and why. To help with this, Google Cloud provides a robust set of no-cost billing and cost management tools that can give you the visibility and insights you need to keep up with your cloud deployment.
2. Figure out which projects cost the most ?— and only pay for what you need. The easiest way to reduce your Google Cloud Platform (GCP) bill is to get rid of resources that are no longer being used. This can feel challenging as your cloud grows. Think about those proof-of-concept projects that are no longer relevant, or old projects that nobody bothered to delete. Google Cloud offers several Recommenders that can help you optimize these resources.
3. Monitor and filter network traffic. Google Cloud comes with several tools that can give you visibility into network traffic ?— and therefore costs. Identify your “top talkers” or services taking up the most of your bandwidth in order to identify how much you are spending on a given Google Cloud service. Cloud Platform SKUs are great for identifying which services are costing you the most.
4. Optimize Cloud Storage by choosing the right storage class. Paying attention to storage utilization and configuration can result in big savings for your company. Storage needs are always changing, and it’s possible that the storage class you picked when you first set up your environment may no longer be appropriate for a given workload. Cloud Storage offers a variety of storage classes — all with varying costs and their own best-fit use cases. 

 Right now, everyone wants to be smart with their money. The goal of operational efficiency is to maximize business value while optimizing cost— so making the most of cloud resources is a good place to start. I invite you to discover how to achieve this in your company and help promote the growth of your business.

 For more on the topic, check out our Cost Management video playlist and deeper dives into other cost optimization strategies for Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Networking, Compute Engine, and Cloud Logging and Monitoring.

 -Links:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIivdWyY5sqKeXavu1XuBNBDLBO31kzM0

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/best-practices-for-optimizing-your-cloud-costs

https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/cost-management/principles-of-cloud-cost-optimization