What are the top Challenges in Achieving Cloud Cost Visibility
A study from the McCary Group suggests that out of the total tech budget of SMBs, cloud services will account for the lion’s share, with nearly 50% of the allocation going toward cloud spending. And while spending is increasing, it’s not only due to high utilization — it’s also because they don’t know what they’re spending their budget on!
With the growing adoption of resource-heavy services such as AI and ML, which are expensive to provision, a lack of visibility and subsequent optimization can eat into the innovation budget, turning cloud from an asset into an expensive liability.
Here are the top reasons organizations struggle with gaining visibility into their cloud spend:
1. Absence of FinOps Culture and Practices
FinOps culture fosters collaboration between finance and tech teams to extract maximum cloud performance per dollar spent on the cloud bill.
Since FinOps is driven by data, and data can be extracted through visibility using tools such as AWS Cost Explorer or AWS Cost and Usage Reports, a lack of engagement from tech teams, due to constraints like bandwidth or shifting priorities, often results in little to no focus on cost management. As a result, organizations experience runaway cloud spend.
2. Complex Billing Structure from Cloud Providers
Cloud platforms, such as AWS, offer multiple billing and pricing models for the same types of resources, including on-demand pricing, yearly commitment-based discounts (AWS RI), and hourly usage discounts (AWS Savings Plans), among others. The problem is further compounded when different billing models are used for different services, making it a significant hassle to ensure cloud cost visibility.
3. Multi-Cloud Infrastructure Complexity
Different cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle, etc.) have their billing formats and metric display systems, which complicates tracking individual resources. This requires separate workflows for each provider, increasing the chances of oversight and impacting cloud cost visibility.
4. Inadequate Tagging Practices
In a mid to large-scale organization, multiple teams and individuals interact with cloud infrastructure, often provisioning resources like EC2 instances across various regions. Without proper tagging practices—such as applying owner, environment, or cost-center tags—it becomes difficult to track resource ownership and purpose.
This lack of attribution is a leading cause of cloud cost overruns due to orphaned or underutilized resources
Must-Have Features in a Cloud Cost Visibility Platform
AWS Cost Explorer, one of the few “free” cost visibility platforms, is not entirely free — its API usage incurs a charge of $0.01 per paginated request. This means that for decent cloud cost visibility and automation, you’ll still be paying.
Therefore, before investing, it is necessary to ensure that your platform includes the following features to make it worth your money:
1. Budgeting and Forecasting Mechanisms
The primary goal of having a detailed understanding and insight into the cloud is to help the business plan their cloud budget efficiently. Thus, the tool should have multi-level budget definitions, dashboards for historical trend analysis, and forecasting powered by AI for enhanced accuracy.
2. Integration with Workflow Tools
For enhanced convenience and productivity, the tool should have some sort of an interface—albeit elementary—into popular workflow tools used by dev teams, such as Slack and Jira, for better cloud cost visibility. With this integration, engineers receive real-time notifications on the cloud’s functioning and can take proactive action.
3. Granular and High-Level Reporting
For the tool to be easy to use for every stakeholder involved—from the business suite (CFOs, CIOs) to engineers with a deep understanding of cloud services—it should display both resource-level cost breakdowns and executive dashboards, along with Month-over-Month trends and Forecasted Spend.
4. Anomaly Detection and Notifications
Anomaly detection is one of the cornerstones of cloud cost visibility. Thus, the tool should accurately report and suggest corrective actions during episodes of potential issues like misconfigurations or resource usage spikes, after comparing them to baseline spending patterns.
5. Simplified Compliance and Governance Management
Cost and cloud spend data contain sensitive information, and if cost and usage details are leaked, it can reveal competitive weaknesses of your organization. Thus, the tool should support RBAC (Role-Based Access Control), enforce strong data encryption, and ensure its features adhere to industry compliance standards such as GDPR and SOC 2.
6. Rate Optimization
Cloud providers, prominent among them AWS, provide resources, ranging from compute, storage, and machine learning etc., at varying rates. One specific example is Spot Instances, which offer up to 90% discounts. Thus, for maximum savings, the visibility tool must also support auto-provisioning features to help minimize the unit price paid.
7. Real-Time Reporting
Taking into consideration the complicated services cloud platforms offer,e.g., Amazon SageMaker or AWS Neptune, which can run up bills into thousands of dollars within hours if misconfigured, you want a platform that gives you real-time spend tracking.
8. Multi-Cloud Support
Many organizations use multiple cloud providers — AWS, GCP, and/or Azure, as part of their cloud infrastructure. Thus, the tool should have API endpoints to simplify integrations with these platforms and provide a unified cloud cost visibility dashboard that displays everything on a single platform.
Save 20% on Your Next Cloud Bill. Here’s How
Visibility into your cloud spend is the first step in saving thousands of dollars on your next cloud bill, and CloudKeeper Lens is the comprehensive cloud intelligence tool that not only provides multi-level insights into your cloud expenditure but also offers suggestions for a leaner cloud, performs automatic RI management, and seamlessly integrates with your AWS account — all while requiring only read-only IAM access.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1: Why cloud cost Visibility is critical for reducing cloud spend?
Cloud Cost Visibility is critical for a leaner cloud because how would you optimize your budget when you don’t know where the budget is being spent in the first place! Visibility platforms empower you with detailed trends and insights, helping you make informed cloud infrastructure decisions while ensuring performance does not degrade.
Q2: How cost allocation and tagging improve cloud cost management?
Tags are key-value pairs that, according to organizational practices, can be unique to specific teams, projects, or departments. Tagging enables accurate tracking and accountability, thereby enhancing cloud cost visibility.
Q3: What Is Cloud Rightsizing and Why It Matter for Cost Optimization?
Right-sizing analyzes resource utilization to recommend adjustments (up or down) in resource size, ensuring you pay only for what you need and avoid overprovisioning of cloud resources.
Q4: What is the cost of your cloud cost visibility platform?
Our platform — CloudKeeper Lens, after a 30-day free trial, costs 1% of your monthly cloud bill, provided you are a CloudKeeper AZ and CloudKeeper EDP+ customer. If you’re not, then CloudKeeper Lens will cost you 2% of your monthly cloud bill.
