8 Tips to Stop Overpaying for the Cloud
One of the main business benefits of moving from on-premise IT infrastructure to the cloud is the potential for major cost savings. By eliminating expensive hardware and software, and the ongoing need to refresh and upgrade infrastructure, organizations can dramatically reduce their IT spend. But those savings don’t happen automatically.
Without proper monitoring and governance in place, cloud costs could quickly spiral out of control. That’s because many organizations either overprovision or underutilize resources without ongoing cloud cost optimization.
What Is Cloud Cost Optimization and Why Is It Important?
“Set it and forget it” works great for slow cookers. Not so much for the cloud.
Cloud cost optimization is adjusting your cloud usage so you only pay for what you actually need. Failure to optimize cloud costs can result in increased spending, underperforming applications, and wasted resources. In fact, the Stacklet “State of Cloud Usage Optimization 2024” survey found that 78% of respondents estimate that 21-50% of their cloud spend is wasted. That’s a pretty big chunk of change left on the table.
By taking the time to optimize cloud costs, or by working with a managed services provider like JetSweep, you can improve resource efficiency, strengthen financial predictability, and empower your team to innovate with confidence.
8 Ways to Reduce Your Cloud Spend
Now that you understand why it’s important to optimize your cloud costs, you can implement these best practices to curb your spending and manage your cloud usage.
1. Understand Your Cloud Bill
Like a lot of things in the tech world, the cloud is complex. And while it can simplify business operations, it also introduces a wide range of components and dependencies that need to be carefully managed. For example, your invoice likely includes charges for:
Compute resources
Managed services
Storage
Bandwidth
Data transfer
By understanding and analyzing your bill, you can spot high-cost areas, eliminate redundancy, and make informed spending decisions.
2. Right-Size Your Resources
Too big? You’re overpaying. Too small? You’re risking performance issues. By analyzing your workloads and regularly evaluating compute, storage, and database usage, you can downscale or terminate underutilized resources.
As an Advanced Amazon Web Services (AWS) Consulting Partner, we use tools like AWS Compute Optimizer to analyze your resource configuration and utilization metrics to provide you with right-sizing recommendations — helping you strike the perfect balance between performance and cost.
3. Identify and Eliminate Zombie Resources
Much like the undead’s desire for, ahem, brains, cloud zombies consume resources and create security risks. This silently drives up costs. These unused (and often hidden) assets typically arise from human error or a lack of visibility, and contribute to the ongoing costs of your cloud without producing any value. Common zombie resources include:
Unattached storage volumes
Idle virtual machines
Unused load balancers
Dormant databases
Orphaned snapshots and backups
Unused IP addresses
Regular audits, tagging policies, and tools like AWS Cost Explorer can help you find and kill these silent resource suckers.
4. Automate Scaling and Scheduling
Why pay for resources you’re not using 24/7?
Auto-adjusting resources based on demand — scaling up during peak usage and down during low-demand periods — can reduce over-provisioning and eliminate idle resources, ensuring optimal resource allocation. You can also schedule resources to start and stop automatically based on a predefined schedule to power down resources during off-peak hours, like weekends and evenings.
5. Consolidate Accounts and Use Cost Allocation Tags
Using AWS Organizations to consolidate accounts simplifies billing and helps you track usage more effectively. Add cost allocation tags to categorize spending by team, project, or department.
This level of granularity makes it easier to forecast spend and identify which workloads are driving your costs.
6. Leverage Third-Party and Native Optimization Tools
Working with a managed services provider or capitalizing on AWS services like Cost Optimization Hub can curb unnecessary cloud spend. At JetSweep, we use CloudCheckr and Anodot for reporting and analytics, which gives us deep visibility into where to reduce costs and how to manage utilization.
Our Managed Services team — backed by Solution Architects — keeps a close eye on your usage and recommends improvements. We also offer annual Well-Architected Reviews to ensure your cloud setup is efficient, secure, and cost-effective.
7. Get Your Project Funded
One way to save on cloud costs is to get funding for net new workloads. AWS funding programs help customers run new workloads on the cloud each year. And as an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, we can help you navigate these programs and secure funding to get your projects off the ground while saving money in the process.
8. Consider Spend Commitments
Savings Plans or Reserved Instances (RIs) are some of the most straightforward and impactful ways to lower your cloud bill. These options can offer significant discounts compared to on-demand pricing, simply by agreeing to use a specific amount of compute over a one- or three-year period.
Control Your Cloud Costs
The cloud shouldn’t be a money pit. Organizations that treat cloud cost optimization as a strategic initiative — not a one-time fix — can gain both financial and operational advantages.
Need help getting started? That’s what we’re here for. Our experts can guide you every step of the way and make your cloud work harder (for less) for your business.
Get in touch to learn more about our complimentary cost optimization assessment.