By: Dennis Oiro

Many businesses have adopted cloud services across the world. Gartner has revealed that the expenditure of end-users on cloud services is growing rapidly and it may hit the $305 billion mark by the end of 2021. 

This development has not come as a surprise. Cloud solutions offer unmatched benefits for businesses, including flexibility, stability, security and reduced costs. Lest we forget, Covid-19 has also accelerated the demand for cloud services. As a result, cloud solutions such as Microsoft Azure are gaining new customers at a high rate. 

Even Shells, a startup that brings cloud-based personal workspaces for coders, workers, creators, students, has experienced an increased demand for its solutions over recent times. 

Cloud is essentially helping small and medium businesses thrive in the market by offering more advantages than traditional systems. However, many businesses are encountering challenges when it comes to the management of cloud-based workflows. 

Many small businesses are grappling with high expenditures on cloud services because they are paying for resources that they don’t use to their full capacity. They are essentially failing to leverage the power of cloud services to take off the ground because they are not aware of opportunities for squeezing storage space, CPU cycles as well as other resources to cut costs.

Luckily, there are cloud cost optimization tools that can help them get the most out of cloud services. Here are the most effective ones for small businesses. 

• Harness

Harness is designed to help finance, engineering, or any other department understand sources of costs and empower them to be proactive about visualizing, optimizing and managing their cloud costs. The best part of the tool is that it offers contextually relevant information no matter your organization's level. 

What's more, it makes it easy for businesses to visualize their cloud resource costs in terms of idle, unallocated, or utilized resources on an hourly basis. With Harness Cloud Cost Management, there are no surprises when it comes to cloud costs. 

• Uptrends

Small businesses can also use Uptrends to manage their cloud expenditure. This tool has helped many businesses to make better decisions about their cloud-capacity purchases. What it does is to avail information about the amount of data a business utilizes and how long a cloud instance will last to users. As a result, businesses will get their respective optimal cloud usage plan that conforms to their needs. 

• Cloud Analyzer

Cloud Analyzer is an equally important tool that offers integrated automation and visibility for businesses to optimize their cloud capacities. With clear visibility of your cloud costs, you're able to make informed decisions and reduce them and enhance cloud efficiency. The tool is known widely for its sophisticated analytics that provides accurate information about all cloud costs. 

• CloudHealth

This tool offers small businesses an opportunity to manage their cloud-based activities easily and efficiently. It is estimated that more than 10000 customers use CloudHealth to reduce their cloud costs across the world. Try this tool and discover ways to cut extra costs that are eating up your hard-earned money.

• Kubecost

Kubecost has also built a good reputation helping small businesses to optimize and manage their Kubernetes resources for many years. It gives your business visibility into its Kubernetes resources in a manner that allows for monitoring outages and reducing your spending. Most importantly, businesses can combine Kubernetes, cloud billing APIs and Kubernetes API to find out about the allocation of resources across server clusters within a short time. 

• Aaptio Cloudability

Aaptio Cloudability is another important tool that can empower your DevOps, finance, and IT teams to work together to make the most out of your cloud resources. The teams are essentially able to maximize quality and speed while minimizing cost. Many small businesses are leveraging the power of this tool to set their team budgets, predict cloud expenditure accurately as well as track costs easily. 

Final Thoughts

The list of cloud cost optimization solutions is endless. There are numerous others that claim that they can get the job done. However, this article has just focused on a few that can guarantee positive results for small businesses. You should also note that the suitable tool for your business also depends on your cloud infrastructural needs. You will be able to narrow the tools down to a single or a few tools after considering your specific cloud needs. 

At the end of the day, an effective cost optimization tool is the one that helps monitor and manage resource allocation, resource utilization and make better decisions to reduce cloud costs.