Cloud-First Environments: How to Weather the Storm of Visibility and Cost
There are two main challenges that add to the complexity of managing IT across an organization:
- Lack of visibility into multiple cloud platforms
- Out-of-control cloud costs
Lack of Visibility in Cloud-First Environments
It is well-known that customers often suffer from a lack of visibility into cloud resources across the enterprise. Mastering this space can take time and some “rolling up of the sleeves”, but it is worth the effort. You will unlock an increase in efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and value across their IT environment. The advantage of cloud-based software and SaaS applications is that it helps optimize consumption, but this has a downside: Having many cloud-based SaaS solutions makes it challenging to see all usage and cloud-spend in one place.
The complexity of managing cloud spend can be amplified quickly when you’re balancing separate reports and have to bounce back-and-forth between different dashboards. The lack of visibility ultimately leads to over-spending on cloud resources which creates headaches for organizations. Without the information you need at your fingertips, you are bound to overlook areas where cost could be reduced (drastically in some cases).
How to Regain Control
So, you may be asking, “how do I overcome these challenges?” or “where do we start?”. Getting started is always the toughest part. But, ServiceNow’s capabilities for managing cloud spend make a pretty good case for anyone who hasn’t yet to get started. Besides, Gartner estimates that organizations without cloud optimization processes will overspend by 40%. Yikes.
The Cloud Spend Dashboard in ServiceNow gives you a quick and clear understanding of cloud spend, trends and forecasts. This provides visibility into projected costs over the next three months which you can view in several different timeframes. You can filter by the forecast for the current month, next month or on a month-by-month basis. To get even more granular, you can utilize the Spend-Optimization dashboard to get breakdowns of spend by group or individuals. Lastly, the Cloud Spend Dashboard will provide visibility into some of the spend that is unaccounted for. This is a great starting point when looking for areas to reduce cost.
Now if you’re thinking, “We only have to look for data in a few places, we can’t be wasting that much”, what if I told you that IDC reported that when asked, customers estimate 20% of their cloud spend is wasted? That’s not even all of it. IDC has identified that on average, there’s an additional 10% waste that isn’t even on customers radars. So, while it might not seem like there is any waste, don’t overlook the possibility that some wasted costs may be flying under the radar.
Take the next step with Milestone and ServiceNow
When it comes to optimizing spend in cloud-first environments, ServiceNow is the only platform that gives you a single source of truth for your cloud environment. Regardless of where you start, it’s crucial that you get started because the numbers don’t lie when it comes to software waste. In fact, Gartner estimates that by the end of 2021, organizations will have wasted $148 billion in software costs.
Milestone helps many of the top brands in the world solve their IT challenges and control runaway costs with IT staffing, customized managed services, and ServiceNow-enabled solutions that set companies up for success.
