How to improve cloud cost visibility

Understanding your organization’s cloud costs is essential for effective data management. By gaining clear visibility into cloud spending, teams can reduce inefficiencies and allocate resources more efficiently. This transparency not only helps organizations save money but also ensures that they get the most value out of their cloud investments.

Cloud cost visibility refers to the ability of businesses to accurately track, monitor, and understand the expenses incurred from using cloud services. It allows organizations to understand their usage by providing clear insights into the various costs associated with cloud applications, resources and infrastructure.

The goal of cloud cost visibility is to use cloud spending data to gain insights into how cloud resources are being used by an organization and how much those resources are costing them. It empowers stakeholders to forecast confidently and resource efficiently. By prioritizing cloud cost visibility, organizations can more easily monitor and analyze the costs associated with cloud services.

The importance of cloud cost visibility continues to grow as it provides organizations with improved accountability and increased financial transparency with the goal of optimizing  cloud costs and resources. According to a November 2023 press release from Gartner, Inc., worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecasted to grow 20.4% to a total of nearly $679 billion in 2024, up from $563.6 billion in 2023. In that same press release, Sid Nag, vice president analyst at Gartner, stated that “Cloud has become essentially indispensable.”

As cloud costs continue to rise, they will likely also increase in complexity. Managing cloud costs has never been more crucial to supporting business efficiency, particularly since cloud costs and usage fluctuate over time. Most organizations now consider maximizing cloud cost visibility—analyzing and predicting costs and optimizing cloud spend—to be a top priority.

When organizations maximize their cloud cost visibility, they gain key insights into how to better manage their budget and optimize cloud resources. Visibility into cloud spend and resourcing helps businesses track, analyze and identify leading cost drivers, as well as forecast and allocate resources confidently.

Achieving maximum cloud cost visibility provides businesses with a wide range of key benefits, such as:

• Cost optimization: With cloud cost visibility, stakeholders can reduce excess spending, establish accountability and more efficiently allocate resources. Real-time cloud cost visibility helps organizations analyze spending across the company, connect cloud spending to business value and pinpoint opportunities for cost optimization.
• Resource optimization: Organizations must have a thorough understanding of what resources they're consuming and who's responsible for them before they can recommend change. Cloud cost visibility helps organizations make informed decisions about usage in order to make the most of, manage and optimize cloud resources.
• Budget planning: Cloud cost visibility helps businesses forecast and budget resources effectively by analyzing current and future workloads, evaluating usage trends, and accounting for unexpected expenses.
• Cost allocation: Cost visibility can also help businesses tie cloud costs with their organizational structure, gaining valuable insights into how different lines of business, specific business units, departments or individuals utilize cloud resources. For example, Capital One Slingshot allows Snowflake customers to monitor spend at a granular level, tracking costs by line of business, in order to allocate resources effectively and maximize ROI.
• Identification of cost drivers: Cloud cost visibility helps businesses identify cost drivers such as server hardware, maintenance contracts, facilities, network, storage, licensing and labor, which helps them make smarter decisions about their cloud usage while reducing unnecessary costs.

Data platforms for the cloud eliminate traditional data silos and provide businesses with data storage, processing and analytic solutions. With these platforms, it is possible to reduce query times from minutes to seconds, push cloud data warehouses to all business users and easily access structured and semi-structured data. Despite the benefits of cloud cost visibility, organizations may face challenges achieving the right level of transparency, including:

• Complexity of pricing: Lack of visibility arises when the right tool isn't available to determine cloud spending and discover unexpected or hidden costs.
• Compute resource optimization: Businesses often make uninformed decisions about usage and purchase decisions without visibility into their resources.
• Data storage management: Lack of visibility can lead to poor data storage decisions, degraded storage performance and wasted storage.
• Lack of granular cost breakdown: Without granular visibility into spending practices, organizations can't effectively track and analyze their expenditures across various cloud services and resources.
• Elasticity and auto-scaling: Effective auto-scaling requires meticulous planning and analysis of workload and performance metrics, which requires visibility into these metrics.
• User and role management: Defining and managing role-based user access cannot be performed properly without organization-wide visibility into all system user profiles.

Lack of cloud cost visibility may also result in organizations overlooking hidden costs, experiencing budget management difficulties and missing opportunities for cost-effective resource allocation.

Capital One Slingshot helps organizations maximize their Snowflake investment with greater visibility into their cost and usage of Snowflake. With granular cost insights, proactive recommendations and alerts, businesses can take actions that improve performance and reduce waste.

Slingshot helps optimize cloud cost visibility in Snowflake in three ways:

• Actionable insights: Detailed dashboards and Snowflake cost and usage breakdowns help customers monitor spend with greater predictability. Custom tagging allows businesses to breakdown warehouse costs in a way that makes sense for their needs for effective reporting, budgeting, and resource allocation.
• Continuous optimization: Monitoring of Snowflake spending and resource utilization helps businesses understand where they could be more efficient. Slingshot features like query advisor and warehouse recommendations provide ongoing suggestions for optimizations that can reduce waste and potentially lower costs.
• Confident control: Proactive alerts help businesses stay up to date on credit usage and cost-spike anomalies. Warehouse templates and built-in auditability helps teams manage workloads more quickly and easily, eliminating bottlenecks and reducing manual oversight. This results in faster optimization cycles that right-size resources and costs.

Cloud cost visibility is a strategic imperative for businesses today. By understanding and managing cloud costs effectively, organizations can optimize resource allocation, enhance budgetary planning and maximize the value derived from their cloud investments. With the right tools and approach businesses can gain actionable insights, drive efficiency and stay ahead in today's dynamic cloud landscape.

Learn more about how Slingshot can enhance cloud cost visibility for users of Snowflake.