What Is Cloud Cost Optimization? Strategy & Best Practices

Anyone who’s owned a home is familiar with the challenge of maintaining a clean garage. You start with a neat environment and what feels like limitless space for storage, a workbench, and maybe even some exercise equipment. But soon a few boxes go here, a few more go there, and the area becomes a chaotic maze with little room to walk, much less park a car.

Cloud computing can present the same challenge. As businesses take advantage of the cloud’s scalability and flexibility to provision servers and computing instances in minutes, cloud environments can quickly become cluttered with unused or underutilized resources, adding unnecessary complexity and chewing up IT budgets. After all, though cloud computing offers customers the benefit of paying for only the cloud resources they choose, cloud service providers (CSPs) may still charge customers whether they use those resources or not.

This is where cloud cost optimization comes in. Its goal: Make cloud environments more efficient and less complex, and ultimately less costly. This article examines how this process works, why it can be difficult to implement, and which best practices to follow to optimize cloud costs successfully.