Native cloud organizations often struggle to realize the hidden costs of their cloud infrastructure. The use of so many instances, databases and storage systems implies a series of connections and uses that can result in an under sizing of some parts of the infrastructure, where instead more resources would be needed, and an oversizing of others, when in fact it is only an excessive expense.
In other words, many companies lack full governance of cloud costs. This has a dual impact: on the one hand, organizations are unable to optimize costs due to the lack of full visibility into the licenses in use, databases and active instances in the cloud, as well as not understanding how the latter are used; on the other hand, they are also unable to fully exploit the opportunities guaranteed by the cloud due to infrastructural and organizational inefficiencies.
Optimizing business costs, avoiding situations such as overprovisioning, therefore becomes central to enhancing native cloud infrastructure. To do this, relying on a software di asset management is essential.
The hidden costs of cloud native
The cloud has expanded the opportunities available to organizations: more agility, more scalability, more flexibility. At the same time, however, many companies have not set up licensing and database control processes for the main vendors. This can cause some instances to go unused but continue to get paid,
In this case, we are talking about overprovisioning: the company is paying more than it actually needs to carry out business activities. Oversizing can relate to the inadequate use of virtual machine resources, storage or in general of every resource used.
If the company uses more software licenses than it acquired, it also exposes itself to the risk of sanctions in the event of a vendor audit, given that it does not maintain extensive control over the licenses.
What’s more, cloud usage is often misaligned with actual business needs: a situation that is pushing many organizations to embrace the FinOps approach to create a cloud-native organizational and business culture where all actors involved are responsible for cloud usage and where performance, quality and costs are balanced in a collective commitment to improving cloud usage.
Cloud native: the role of software asset management
Native cloud companies therefore need to integrate control processes that can support advanced management of the cloud, software licenses and databases.
In that sense, the adoption of software asset management systems to implement routine controls of software licenses and cloud resources used in order to optimize costs is growing. An operation that must not be interpreted solely as intended to save money, but as a due alignment between the actual needs of the business and spending on the cloud, consistent with these needs.
Software asset management offers a number of benefits, including:
- Regular checks of installed applications
- Automated and customized tips to make the use of cloud resources more efficient
- The guarantee of a complete and organized overview of the cloud infrastructure and interconnections
- The certainty of passing software audits
To be cloud native you need to strengthen controls
The cloud native approach involves businesses embracing the cloud. But this is only the first step: the second is to integrate a series of controls, including automated ones, which guarantee that this cloud implementation works in a manner aligned with business needs, free from the hidden costs deriving from bad configurations or unused instances and which can, essentially, adhere to a FinOps culture that combines financial well-being and cloud opportunities.
Business enhancement leverages the cloud to maximize business opportunities and accelerate digital transformation. Being able to guarantee certain results while keeping costs under control is essential to promote better and more advanced business dynamics.