Being on the cloud comes with a cost. And as more and more organizations switch to the cloud, there arises a need to have a mechanism to control the rising cloud costs.
Most IT departments tend to disregard the fact that cloud resources are metered which often leads to a spike in data fee. To this end, companies need to hire a cloud economist.
Who is a Cloud Economist?
Fancy it might sound; a cloud economist is nothing but a financial manager who handles cloud fee and optimization calculating and managing your overall cloud finances. The rising need of hiring a cloud economist is not just a fad but a necessity for the companies.
It not only adds value to building a systemized cloud financial center but also bridges the knowledge gap and provides clarity to the concerned stakeholders.
Since cloud is the future, businesses must invest in understanding the whole economics of the cloud. Organizations need to have financial transparency in the cloud holdings. Information such as data spends, cloud footprint can help you reduce your cloud bills.
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How does a Cloud Economist help?
With expertise in cloud-spending, a Cloud Economist works on cloud cost optimizations which benefits the organizations in cloud-native architecture with reduced costs. A cloud economist helps you with revenue growth, cost-cutting, and risk aversion. The role requires a person to understand and extract the most out of the technicality and economics of the cloud. They need to break down the server costs as the bandwidth scales, manage runaway costs that come with cloud adoption, and more.
A cloud economist’s profile may include CSP migration, predicting the cost for future feature implementation, and advising the IT teams with insights on other cloud costs. They may also work closely with the monitoring and testing teams.
A cloud economist will be majorly responsible for the following:
-Manage the elasticity of applications and upgrading servers.
-Track the increase in costs and being a Terms of Service (ToS) expert.
-Handle database scalability and data loads.
-Work on limiting the use of new cloud tools and predict the effect of feature updates.
-Avoid expensive data replications and discontinue redundant features.
-Act as an interface between a company and CSPs while optimizing the subscriptions.
So, what to do if your cloud costs are hitting the roof? Here are some ways which can help you optimize your cloud cost:
Conduct performance analysis: To achieve savings on pay-as-you-go pricing you need to use reporting features of the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) for performance analysis.
Reduce extra storage: Utilizing storage can reduce costs like anything. Ensure there are less data duplication and redundancies which can help in saving storage and subsequently costs.
Deploy an inventory owner: Assigning a person who can track and control costs of the utilization of servers and services is crucial to bring down your cloud costs.
Review support contracts: A crucial thing to remember is to end all your support contracts with the on-premise servers once you move to the cloud.
Identify overprovisioning: It is important to know where you have overprovisioned the resources especially in the application migration from dedicated servers to virtual cloud servers.
Also Read: Distributed Cloud Computing: Benefits and Limitations
Conclusion
It is not just the big businesses with big cloud costs that can benefit from a cloud economist. Irrespective of the size and scale, organizations should accept the significance of the role and think about investing in the same. A thought about your cloud expenses can save you from spending more and also allows for a better coordinated, transparent, and responsible work culture among teams. For more info on cloud costs, you can get in touch with our experts.