Manage economic sustainability
In brief
Economic management of the cloud is a continuous process, not a one-time intervention. It involves monitoring expenses, preventing waste, and optimizing resource usage to ensure a balance between costs, service quality, and long-term sustainability.
Roles and responsibilities
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Public Administration
Defines economic governance rules and monitors expenses to ensure that resources are used efficiently and sustainably.
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Cloud service provider
Implements tools for cost monitoring, optimization, and reporting to support the PA in applying the FinOps model and managing resources.
How to proceed
These activities help monitor costs, identify potential waste, and implement improvement measures.
- Apply FinOps principles for cost control
The PA adopts FinOps methodologies to align technical and economic aspects.
It is necessary to involve multiple roles: from the administration to the provider’s experts and operational managers, to define responsibilities and set measurable objectives for monitoring performance and spending.
- Continuously monitor consumption and resources
Together, the PA and the provider use analytics tools to visualize CPU, storage, traffic, and license costs in real time.
Tip: to understand where resources are being spent and identify inefficiencies or duplications, tags or labels can be used.
- Optimize resources and consumption
Together, the PA and the provider identify and reduce waste such as:
- inactive or oversized instances;
- obsolete data or uncompressed logs;
- redundant synchronization or backup processes;
- purchased but unused resources.
The provider helps configure auto-scaling systems that adjust resources to actual load, automatically balancing performance and costs.
- Use more cost-effective pricing models
The PA checks whether it is possible to take advantage of discounted rates based on volume or contract duration. Costs can be reduced by committing to longer-term consumption or using shared solutions across multiple services.
A good practice is to consider, when possible, using multiple cloud providers to maintain flexibility and avoid lock-in,which is the risk of dependency on a single provider.
- Establish a periodic review cycle
The PA sets a cadence (monthly or quarterly) to review spending reports, compare them with planned budgets, and update optimization plans.
It is important to also involve technical and administrative teams to ensure alignment between economic objectives and service performance.
Materials and tools
See the manual for more details
