![](\"http:\/\/www.cloudcomputing-news.net\/media\/img\/news\/businessmans-boat-and-gold-coins-sinking-vector-id1060466178.jpg\")
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A recent Gartner report estimated that <\/span>80 percent of organisations will overshoot their cloud budgets<\/span><\/a> by 2020 because of a lack of optimisation. Obviously, this frustrates executives. It’s particularly hard to deal with in the case of multi-cloud environments, where each provider’s bill might be a million-plus lines long.<\/span><\/p>\n If your organisation is among those with surprisingly high multi-cloud costs, rest assured: it’s possible to align costs with expectations. Here, I outline a strategy that will help you do so by addressing the root causes.<\/span><\/p>\n Before tackling cost, it’s essential to understand the underlying strategic business reasons for using a multi-cloud environment. Common reasons include:<\/span><\/p>\n If you didn’t have a particular strategic reason for choosing multi-cloud – or if your main reason was that you hoped to save money – you may want to consider moving to a single-cloud setup. With a single cloud provider, you may be a big enough customer to get discounts or freebies (like security services), which can help keep costs down. <\/span><\/p>\n You may also, as I mentioned above, be able to use features that could improve your business in various ways.<\/span><\/p>\n If, however, your strategic reason for choosing multi-cloud is still relevant – meaning you want to maintain your multi-cloud setup – it’s time to consider two things: the architecture of your cloud environment and your total cost of ownership.<\/span><\/p>\n Moving an in-house data centre to the cloud requires more than a simple lift-and-shift. That’s doubly true for multi-cloud, where certain architectures can substantially increase what you pay for cloud services.<\/span><\/p>\n For example, if you have an app that straddles different clouds and sends data between environments, you may incur bandwidth charges every time the app sends a request to a different environment. <\/span><\/p>\n Depending on the app’s functionality, this could add up to a lot of unnecessary costs. It’s common for thousands to tens of thousands of dollars a month to be eaten up by inter-application data transfer costs. The solution: examine how your apps are structured within the clouds you’re using and adjust that structure to limit double dipping.<\/span><\/p>\n In some cases, using software like <\/span>CloudCheckr<\/span><\/a> or <\/span>CloudHealth<\/span><\/a> can help this process; these apps analyse costs and make recommendations about how to lower them. But keep in mind that recommendations are not business-specific. Many will be red herrings. You’ll need a knowledgeable cloud professional to evaluate the recommendations in light of your specific business goals.<\/span><\/p>\n Even if you can reduce cloud-specific costs with improved architecture, don’t forget to consider your infrastructure’s total cost of ownership. TCO is often higher in a multi-cloud setup, even when cloud-specific costs are lower. Why? There are three main reasons:<\/span><\/p>\n These costs, of course, may be acceptable depending on your strategic reason for maintaining a multi-cloud setup. The key is to consider them in a strategic context.<\/span><\/p>\n As with any cloud decision, the choice of whether to stick with a multi-cloud setup should be driven by larger business goals. The cloud infrastructure should serve the business – not the other way around. If you’re unsure where to start in evaluating your cloud architecture and spend, talk with a knowledgeable cloud consultant, who can make recommendations based on your business goals.<\/span><\/p>\n A recent Gartner report estimated that 80 percent of organisations will overshoot their cloud budgets by 2020 because of a lack of optimisation. Obviously, this frustrates executives. It’s particularly hard to deal with in the case of multi-cloud…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":559,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/559"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38747"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38747\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38748,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38747\/revisions\/38748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}First: Why multi-cloud?<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n
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Architecture: Make sure you’re not double-paying<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n
Total cost of ownership<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n
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Cloud decisions are business decisions<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n
![\"https:\/\/www.cybersecuritycloudexpo.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/cyber-security-world-series-1.png\"](\"https:\/\/www.cybersecuritycloudexpo.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/cyber-security-world-series-1.png\")
<\/span><\/a>Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases<\/strong>? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series<\/a> with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"