Optimizing cloud spend with Lightstream

With a looming recession and uncertainty growing, more organizations are looking for ways to cut spending and increase efficiencies. Many have laid off parts of their workforce, while others have streamlined processes and found a way to do more with less.

But with cloud spend typically responsible for half of many IT budgets, CIOs are heavily scrutinizing the costs of operating in the cloud. The cloud is no longer the future—it’s the now—but savvy companies are exploring options to reduce associated costs. And they’re doing it by working with cloud-managed service providers like Lightstream.

An all-you-can-eat environment with a hefty price tag

Legacy applications, expensive servers and data warehouses, and sky-high maintenance fees all make migrating your on-prem services to the cloud appealing. And many organizations have either partially or fully done just that, fully expecting to save money. But is that reality?

Total public cloud spending rose to $383.6 billion in 2021, up from $307.7 billion in 2020—totaling almost $700 billion spent by enterprises globally on the cloud during the pandemic.  

** From IDC’s Worldwide Cloud Spending Guide

If you’re not closely monitoring your cloud billing, then you may be racking up astronomical fees without realizing it until you receive your bill. Here’s why. Andi Karaboutis, global CIO of National Grid, compares the cloud to an all-you-can-eat restaurant.

“When you go to the cloud, [you] see [you] can get more of everything, and [you] can end up where the costs go through the roof.” There is so much capability that it often leads to overconsumption—just like at an unlimited buffet.

Your engineers or developers can do so much in the cloud, including innovations that may generate new revenue. But that revenue is more long-term, and it has CFOs questioning if the high bills are worth it.

Gaining efficiencies through insights

While the cloud is at least, in part, the new way of doing business, spending can get out of hand quickly if you don’t closely monitor and manage it.

Dilip Venkatachari, senior executive vice president and global chief information and technology officer of U.S. Bank, emphasizes this sentiment, imploring IT teams to “track and attribute expenses to specific applications over time. Knowing where the greatest demands are is the first step to [managing] costs.”

It all starts with data and gleaning insights into your spending and day-to-day operations. Cloud-managed service providers can help give you what you need to (first) understand your spending and then optimize for savings.

Leveraging Lightstream’s cloud-managed services

Cloud-managed services give you the insights you need to make smarter decisions in the cloud by providing visibility into resource allocation, usage, service inventory, day-to-day operations, and security or configuration gaps.

“In only a few months, Lightstream helped us identify and remediate several security vulnerabilities, improve compliance by 26%, technically right-size applications, and cut our cloud spend by 35%.” – Richard Mann, chief product officer, Decisely

Using Lightstream Connect, we offer a holistic view of your tech spend, so you can see where you’re overspending, where you can cut costs, and how you can improve efficiencies for even further savings. With custom reporting and up-to-date dashboards, you always know what’s going on and how much you’re spending.

We’ve brought everything you need to know about daily operations and cloud spend into a single platform—no more opening multiple bills and spreadsheets, just everything you need, all in one place. View real-time data, analyze reports, and optimize for cost savings.

Balancing cost with value—together

Whether you’re fully migrated to the cloud or working in a hybrid cloud environment, you are likely joining the hundreds of CIOs trying to find ways to cut down on cloud spend. Lightstream can help.

We work alongside you to understand your cloud usage and find ways to be more efficient—streamlining your bills, analyzing data, and optimizing your daily operations. So, if you’re ready to embrace the cloud without its exorbitant costs, contact us today.