Save money on multi-cloud deployments. AKA: Take back Monday.

It’s Monday morning. For one unfortunate CIO, that means a tedious, time-consuming meeting with the CFO to review expenditures on each of the organization’s cloud accounts. After migrating many workloads to the cloud, their usage for these services is out of control. With multiple cloud providers, it’s difficult and time consuming to keep on top of who’s spending what.

The dreaded Monday morning meetings

I asked this CIO how they got to this point. He explained that their business units were going straight to the cloud because they needed access to resources faster. They started cautiously, but very quickly their public cloud usage got out of control.

He said that they received a surprise bill at the end of the month and would just pay it. At least with their on-premises infrastructure, they knew ahead of time what their hardware cost would be. Of course, operating cost is a different story…

So now, every Monday morning the CFO and the CIO review what each department spent during the week. It’s time-consuming to put all the data together, but they have a slightly better handle on how they could control IT costs across the company.      

Businesses all over the world in all industries face this same challenge. Fortunately, the CIO cited above worked out a solution to control public cloud spend, albeit time-consuming and manual. Many other enterprises are still pouring money into the problem. 

Challenge: Gain control of a multiple cloud environment

Keeping track of users, applications, and resources across multiple cloud environments can be a real challenge. What if you need a broader view – one that lets you analyze cloud expenditures across your entire infrastructure? Or maybe you need a more detailed view – one that looks at the average running cost of a single VM and not just the total cost. And what about your on-premises resources? Shouldn’t they be in your budget too? 

Is it too much to ask to have the ability to monitor resource utilization and costs to intelligently optimize resources and workloads, and achieve greater cost efficiency on and off-premises? I don’t think it is.

What’s needed is a hybrid-cloud management platform that provides a unified experience across public clouds, on-premises private clouds, and software-defined infrastructure. This ideal platform should provide a unified view of resource utilization and costs across your entire hybrid cloud estate, with actionable measures to control spending. This will enable you to do the following:

• Match enterprise costs and utilization objectives
• Compare pricing across different cloud models
• View cost and utilization across public and private clouds in one place

A hybrid cloud management platform should provide reporting tools that easily generate standard reports to filter key cloud cost buckets and create custom reports that filter individual projects and lines of business. And, a unified dashboard should allow you to access critical information quickly. For example, you may want to see usage reports for all configured public cloud providers, usage costs across a specified time range, or comparative costs across different time periods.

For private clouds, it would be ideal to have a platform that creates a cost model similar to public clouds by providing a metered usage of consumed cloud resources. This capability could increase private cloud efficiency by making sure compute components are not under-utilized.

Goodbye dreaded Monday. A solution is here today.

Let Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) help you simplify your hybrid cloud experience with modern technologies and software-defined solutions. And for advice on your digital transformation journey, visit HPE Pointnext, a trusted partner who can help solve IT complexity and point you toward what’s next. 

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About Chris Purcell

^{Chris Purcell drives analyst relations for the Software-Defined and Cloud Group at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The Software-Defined and Cloud Group organization is responsible for marketing for HPE Synergy, HPE OneView, HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged solutions, and HPE OneSphere. To read more from Chris Purcell, please visit the HPE Shifting to Software-Defined blog.}