Companies struggling with high cloud costs: Best practices to avoid wasting money

More organizations like yours are moving various operations to the cloud, including key Finance and HR functions. And while that comes with convenience – and potential security risks – cloud costs can be expensive for companies if the migration process isn’t monitored closely.

Companies shifting their processes to the cloud often have issues controlling cloud spend, according to a new report from software vendor Anodot.

Top challenges with cloud costs

The biggest challenges for employers are monitoring costs, optimizing their resource use and forecasting future spend, per Anodot’s research. This was the case for small businesses and enterprises alike.

Close to 50% of IT execs Anodot surveyed said it was difficult to get their cloud costs under control, with the top issue being a lack of visibility into cloud usage and costs (cited by 53%). Other problems that hindered their ability to control cloud costs included complex cloud pricing (50%), complex multi-cloud environments (49%) and lack of centralized cloud governance (35%).

Effective strategies to manage cloud costs

Nearly 90% of execs surveyed said that optimizing and reducing spend on their existing cloud resources is extremely or very important.

And given that 60% also said it’s their top priority to migrate more workloads to the cloud in the coming year, it’s important to get cloud costs under control before more money’s wasted.

One element that contributes to the lack of visibility is the fact that many companies have invested in multiple cloud-based systems for different aspects of the organization. Finance may use one solution, HR may use another, and there may be different solutions used by sales teams and customer service departments.

Often, these solutions have different pricing structures, which makes it tough for Finance to determine how much the company is spending in total on different cloud solutions and migrations.

That’s why it’s important to consolidate cloud operations when you can. Many top Finance and HR cloud solutions have modular components that address multiple business aspects, handling everything from payroll and tax compliance to onboarding and employee training.

Specifically, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems offer this functionality. Some even have customer relationship management (CRM) features. This means the right ERP can be a one-stop shop for all your company’s cloud software needs.

In cases where you do need multiple cloud-based solutions for your company’s operations, it’s key for your Finance pros to closely monitor the total costs of usage, getting the complete details on each solution’s pricing structure (including any additional costs you may be paying for things like implementation or customer support). That’ll help you and your team get a good picture of how much you’re spending now – and how much you might need to spend in the future if you’re expanding or updating your cloud workloads.

When shopping for new cloud software, Finance needs to do a great deal of research beforehand. Many solutions don’t offer pricing up front, preferring to provide prospects with custom quotes tailored to their unique needs.

With that in mind, you and your team should have a list of requirements ready before talking to vendors, since the features you need will likely impact the price quoted. That way, you’ll have a better idea of how much you’ll pay for the solution. This will also help you better compare cloud vendors against each other.