Thinking It Over: 5 Ways IT Shops Can Manage Cloud Costs

Grazed from The DataCenter Journal. Author: Richard Seroter.

On his classic 1950s TV show, the immortal Jack Benny once replied to a mugger—who said, “This is a stickup. Now come on. Your money or your life…”—by saying “I’m thinking it over!” Jack Benny would have been a great IT operations manager.

Another time, when told “You’re gonna give us $10,000, or we’re gonna break both your legs,” he replied, “Does it have to be both?” Faced with seeming life-or-death financial decisions, the seasoned IT manager knows that the correct answer is seldom the easy one. Some evolving practices in the cloud, however, are making it a bit easier to deliver outstanding cloud-based IT while managing costs. Below, we’ve listed five simple tactics to help IT shops achieve more from their cloud spend…

1. Centralize software provisioning and activities to economize licensing-management spend. Some IT organizations spend countless hours auditing their environment to provide accurate usage information to software vendors. Now, it is possible to simplify this chore. IT managers can use the capabilities of advanced cloud-management platforms to track server provisioning and software installations. Administrators only have to review a single activity log to see what software was deployed and for how long. Some platforms even offer a catalog of enterprise software products that can be layered on after the server is built. The catalog approach can simplify administration and expand deployment configuration options…

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