EDITOR ’ S QUESTION
PETE LILLEY , VICE PRESIDENT AND GENERAL
MANAGER , INSTACLUSTR
Migrating from a data center to the cloud means saving on the electricity used to power your servers , storage , cooling and backup systems .
To meaningfully and safely rein in cloud costs , CIOs and their teams must really zero in on the KPIs that matter the most to their cloud operations . Metrics need to be accurate and quantifiable , of course , but they must also be relevant . Chasing after the wrong cloud operations measurements will do more harm than good when it comes to paring overspend .
So , what matters when trying to trim cloud costs ? A lot , but I ’ ll focus on a few of the most important ( and perhaps overlooked ) cloud cost KPIs .
Monthly cloud bills are the first key indicator to actively monitor ( and regularly review ) for optimization opportunities .
Check that costs align with your billing forecasts , track the ups and downs of cloud costs over time and identify – and ideally act on – potential cost-saving opportunities . Tools like Spot by NetApp are among the CloudOps solutions built to find cost-saving recommendations based on cloud usage data .
Also important : the personnel costs of both your general staffing and IT staffing . This is an oftenoverlooked cloud cost KPI .
You need the visibility to recognize , for instance , if the finance team has become increasingly burdened by IT cost analysis or if IT operations staff costs are creeping up . Said another way , cloud costs don ’ t only show up in monthly cloud bills , there is always an employee-time component that needs to be part of the equation .
As more CIOs lead their enterprises through cloud migrations , the energy cost savings associated with cloud infrastructure is another KPI that should be considered . Migrating from a data center to the cloud means saving on the electricity used to power your servers , storage , cooling and backup systems .
It ’ s also worth comparing cloud operations costs to your previous on-premises benchmarks and understanding whether they ’ ve risen or fallen as a proportion of your total business spend .
Finally , study budget variance as a KPI to ensure that cloud spending is always well-aligned with overall budgeting expectations and goals .
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