The promise of the cloud has always revolved around agility, scalability, and cost savings. However, as organisations scale their cloud usage, they often find themselves grappling with unexpected expenses, sprawl, and fragmented governance. In 2019, as cloud adoption matures, the focus shifts from migration to optimisation.
Understanding the Cloud Cost Challenge
Cloud expenses often creep up silently. Teams spin up resources for development and testing, leave them running, or duplicate workloads for temporary use cases. Without tight governance, organisations lose visibility into where costs accumulate.
In multi-cloud environments, where different teams use different platforms, billing becomes even harder to track. Enterprises that once embraced “lift and shift” find that legacy architecture on cloud infrastructure only increases operating costs.
Cloud Governance Frameworks
Implementing a cloud governance model is essential. This includes defining policies for provisioning, access control, data sovereignty, tagging, and lifecycle management.
- Policy enforcement: Enforce guardrails around instance types, regions, and pricing tiers.
- Resource tagging: Enable categorisation by department, project, or environment to enable cost reporting and accountability.
- Automation: Use scheduled jobs or serverless functions to stop idle resources and scale compute dynamically.
Optimising with FinOps Principles
FinOps—an evolving financial management discipline for cloud—helps bridge the gap between engineering, finance, and business. It promotes collaborative spending decisions with real-time visibility into cost metrics.
In 2019, enterprises adopt FinOps tooling and practices such as:
- Rightsizing: Adjusting compute resources to actual workload usage based on monitoring data.
- Commitment plans: Leveraging reserved instances or savings plans with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud for predictable workloads.
- Chargebacks: Assigning cloud usage to business units to drive ownership and accountability.
Controlling Sprawl
Cloud sprawl is the unchecked proliferation of services across environments. It introduces risks, complexity, and cost inefficiencies. Preventing it requires cultural and procedural change:
- Establish a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE).
- Adopt infrastructure as code (IaC) to track deployments.
- Audit accounts regularly and decommission unused services.
Modern Tooling for Visibility
Leading organisations use third-party cost monitoring platforms such as CloudHealth, Apptio Cloudability, and native tools like AWS Cost Explorer or Azure Cost Management. These offer granular insight into spend trends, anomalies, and optimisation opportunities.
These tools help automate budgeting alerts and anomaly detection—critical in environments where development teams operate independently.
Cloud Cost Reviews as a Practice
Forward-thinking IT teams embed monthly or quarterly cost reviews into their operational rhythm. These reviews look at spend variance, forecast accuracy, optimisation backlog, and tagging coverage. They often include recommendations for remediation and business impact.
By treating cost management as a continuous process, teams evolve beyond reactive cost-cutting and toward proactive planning.
Aligning Governance with Business Goals
It’s not just about saving money—it’s about aligning spend with outcomes. For example, higher cloud spend may be acceptable if it enables faster delivery, uptime guarantees, or customer satisfaction improvements.
Effective governance should therefore embed business context into decisions. FinOps culture encourages conversations around trade-offs between cost and value—making it a strategic advantage, not just an operational task.
Conclusion
Cloud cost optimisation in 2019 demands more than shutting down idle instances. It calls for holistic governance, engineering discipline, cultural alignment, and tooling. With FinOps and modern governance models, businesses can maintain agility while keeping cloud economics under control.