With cloud computing comes a lot of flexibility. However, it also brings a lot of responsibilities and cost implications as well. The main burden you may have to bear with is unexpected cost overruns. Companies moving from physical storage face new costs. Therefore, companies with no concrete plan will find it hard to pull together financial resources to finance the move and the entire migration may not even take off. 

Businesses often migrate to the cloud to reduce costs but continue facing numerous challenges along the way. The leading challenge is lack of visibility. While most investments on cloud service start with lower costs, these costs can end up spiraling to unexpected levels over time and may end up being out of control. Part of the challenge is the lack of proper cloud governance. Many companies end up using additional resources that increase costs if controls are not put in place. Similarly, testing new applications and operations on the cloud often increase the workload and raise the monthly bills. Therefore, moving workloads to the cloud without a good cost management framework is a recipe for problems since your business can incur high costs at the end of the month and the strategy may end up being a source of grief. Basically, you will pay for whatever you forget to turn off in the cloud.

Like any other technology, there are changes in the habits of the users with regard to the cloud. With these changes, there is a need for visibility that ensures that management is continuous. Failure to manage continuously and waiting for surprises in the monthly invoice will end up causing cost overruns that many businesses would want to avoid. Successful management of costs requires coordination among different stakeholders as this will allow the business to discover bottlenecks and deliver value that is what any business needs in its investments.

The cost of cloud strategy should be broken down into compute time, storage and bandwidth offered. With such an approach, your business can develop cloud infrastructure with reasonable costs and avoid losses that result from use of extra space. Although the cloud can be costly if you fail to manage it properly, it has proven to be the cheapest alternative compared to the on-premise storage if carried out properly.