In this article, you will learn effective ways on how to manage IT costs. Recently, IT departments face increasing pressure to reduce costs while maintaining high-quality services. A McKinsey and University of Oxford study found that large IT projects, on average, run 45% over budget and 7% over time while delivering 56% less value than predicted. This alarming trend emphasizes the need for effective IT cost management strategies.

A major problem led Amazon to introduce Cost Explorer and Cost and Usage Reports. Many Amazon Web Services (AWS) users were overspending on services they couldn’t quite identify. Before the two cloud financial management tools, the AWS public cloud was like a buffet menu without prices. Engineers could use as many cloud resources as possible (and then some), only to be hit with surprise bills at the end of the month or billing cycle.

As more and more companies are moving their operations to the cloud, cost management becomes one of the significant concerns, and Azure cost allocation provides the solution for it. Due to the fact that more and more companies use Azure services, it has become crucial to define the correct Azure cost allocation and resource management.

As both the State Of FinOps 2024 and the State Of Cloud Costs In 2024 indicate, reducing cloud waste remains a top priority for cloud-driven organizations. Cloud spenders care more than ever about cost efficiency — and CloudZero is working tirelessly to make cloud savings simpler. To this end, we’re proud to announce that we’ve added a suite of automated Azure optimizations to our already robust library of automated Insights.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers a great alternative to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. If you use Google Products extensively at work, such as Google Workspace, moving to GCP may be a natural choice. Perhaps you already use GCP with AWS, Azure, or another cloud provider as part of your hybrid cloud strategy. But maybe you struggle to manage GCP costs, monitor security and compliance, and observe performance.

The cloud offers many benefits, including scalability, cost savings, and operational efficiency. But here’s the deal. Organizing, monitoring, and controlling a cloud environment can become complex as workloads, applications, services, and underlying infrastructure grow. Businesses can better control and monitor their cloud infrastructure services, resources, and data using cloud management software.

Cloud services have become an indispensable resource for businesses seeking agility, scalability, and innovation. However, with this increased reliance on the cloud comes the challenge of managing and optimizing costs effectively. For Chief Financial Officers (CFOs), understanding and tracking cloud cost metrics is crucial to maintaining financial health and ensuring strategic investments yield the desired returns.

IT infrastructure optimization should be a top priority. It is not just about upgrading hardware or software but about ensuring that all components work together seamlessly to support business needs. Your IT infrastructure supports all your daily operations and some of your long-term strategic goals. In this article, we'll explore the key aspects of IT infrastructure optimization, discuss practical steps to improve performance, and offer tips for managing costs.

Organizations often assume that switching to Amazon Web Services (AWS) will automatically reduce their on-premises spending. Certainly, cloud-based services like AWS’ Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) can offer significant cost savings. Yet overspending on AWS is quite common. How can you tell if moving to AWS is the right decision? What figures would you use to quantify and justify that choice to decision-makers? Enter Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) on AWS.

Like most organizations, we are always trying to be as efficient as possible in our usage of our cloud resources. To help accomplish this, we encourage individual engineering teams at Datadog to look for opportunities to optimize. They can share their performance wins, big or small, in an internal Slack channel along with visualizations and, often, calculations of the resulting annual cost savings.