The cloud offers big benefits for small businesses. From simple scalability to granular control over all aspects of workloads, platforms and security, cloud solutions can help SMBs better compete with their enterprise counterparts. In fact, 61% of SMBs have moved workloads to the public cloud.
With a shift to the cloud, however, comes a shift in spending, and if SMBs aren’t prepared, cloud costs can spiral out of control. Here’s a look at some of the top challenges in cloud financial management, and how CDW’s Inscape Cloud Management tool can help.
Common Challenges in Cloud Financial Management
Three cloud challenges are common for SMBs.
First up is skill mastery. While many small businesses are familiar with traditional data center operations, they often lack the know-how to efficiently manage cloud deployments. Training can help bridge the gap, but with teams focused on business growth, it’s often hard to find the time and the budget.
SMBs also tend to overprovision with extra storage and compute resources. This is a holdover from traditional data center operations that focused on managing operational peaks — ensuring that even if storage and computing power weren’t immediately required, they were available. In the cloud, both are available on-demand, eliminating the need for overprovisioning.
FIND OUT: How FinOps can help control your cloud spending.
Finally, small businesses often struggle to identify which workloads belong in the cloud and which are better kept on-premises. Consider a 1-terabyte, cloud-based file server that costs $500 per month to operate. Compared with an on-premises piece of hardware that costs $10,000 upfront and lasts five years, this may seem like a great deal.
Until you do the math. At $500 per month over five years, the cloud-based server costs $60,000, or five times as much.
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How to Take Control of Cloud Costs with Inscape
Inscape is CDW’s exclusive cloud management platform. Built on a FinOps model, Inscape was designed from the ground up as an agile, transparent solution to help SMBs take control of their cloud costs.
Benefits include:
- Operations monitoring. Inscape can summarize different data points and present them in a way that’s concise and user-friendly. This lets managers pinpoint where operations are working as intended and where improvements can be made. With Inscape, businesses can handle monitoring and provisioning themselves or leverage value-added services for more hands-on FinOps assistance.
- Budget creation and management. Building an effective cloud budget requires transparency. SMBs need to know what services they’re using, how often they’re using them and what these services cost. Inscape can assist with this by, for example, helping companies discover virtual machines that are no longer being used or are only being used at a fraction of their capacity. Equipped with this data, businesses can either consolidate or shut down VMs to lower total costs. Full transparency into cloud services gives SMBs the data they need to create a comprehensive IT budget.
- Granular visibility. Inscape provides a detailed level of visibility into cloud spending by account, service or resource. SMBs also get cost-saving and cloud optimization recommendations to help improve performance and reduce total spending.
For SMBs, it’s easy for cloud investments to become a cycle of underutilization and overspending. Inscape Cloud Management from CDW helps businesses can break the cycle with improved visibility, transparency and reporting across their entire IT environment.
This article is part of BizTech’s AgilITy blog series.
