We’re all living in a new reality these days, and for many enterprises, that means moving everything to the cloud. The Wall Street Journal reported that cloud-computing providers were emerging among the few corporate winners during COVID-19 — which is excellent news for cloud providers, but potentially not so much for organizations that may have been pushed into unfamiliar territory out of necessity.
The cloud can create many challenges for organizations, and one of those is the cost — not just the initial outlay, but also over time. Cloud invoices can be complex and difficult to understand; it’s not unusual for bills to be thousands of lines long. That means companies may be spending more than they need to. Yet this length does not equate depth; the bills often lack the detail required to understand and allocate costs, leading to lack of control and overspending.
Controlling Cloud Costs
So what’s an organization? We recommend a three-pronged approach: understand, optimize, and control.
1 – Understand how you’re using the cloud and why. Are you trying to increase agility? Cut costs? Set yourself up for a mobile workforce?” Your plan may offer features you’ll never use and have no need for; if that’s the case, get rid of them.
2 – Optimize what you’re doing with the cloud. Organizations often overestimate how much capacity they actually need for the data they want to store and what their workforce actually uses, making it easy to overinvest in the cloud. You can always scale up later, so only use what you need for right now, and add on if your needs grow.
3 – Control the way your organization is using the cloud. This comes after the first two steps, because without an understanding of how you’re using the cloud and what you need from it, it’s difficult to control cloud usage — but it’s critical to get the most out of your investment through cloud expense management. Control doesn’t just mean getting a handle on cloud spend; it also means appropriately allocating what and how you spend. By charging each department or cost center for their individual cloud usage, business leaders gain visibility into spend, as well as the ownership needed to control cost and investment.
Cloud Expense Management with Tangoe
For organizations that don’t have the time or resources to do a deep dive into cloud expenses, Tangoe is here to help. Our Cloud Expense Management platform takes the guesswork out of the cloud and shows exactly where your resources are being utilized while also revealing cost-savings opportunities and ways to use data for spend forecasting and trend analysis.
The Tangoe cloud application is not out-of-the-box software. It’s a people-powered experience that connects siloed data sources, automates tasks, and empowers you to make the best decisions for your organization. You’ll get dynamic, custom analytics with insights from our finance and IT experts:
- Single Sign-on (SSO) Support, allowing users to log in to Tangoe’s cloud application with their corporate security credentials and access all of their applications from one portal.
- Bill Pay+ Integration, which streamlines the bill payment process and eliminates additional manual work by automating the transfer of the pay file used to initiate vendor payments.
- Reporting and analytics updates, like the Cumulative Cost Tracker Dashboard, which provides the ability to analyze cloud spend and immediately see how costs are trending.
- Dashboard Report Folders, which allow service delivery team members to more effectively support customers by simplifying the creation and delivery of custom content.
- A new user interface, for a consistent user experience across the Tangoe Platform.
- Module Migration, which allows users to access modules from the main screen of the application, improving accessibility and the overall navigation experience.
Ready to optimize your cloud expenses? Request a demo to see how Tangoe can help.