Tag Management | 4 Min Read

Tagging and Cloud Costs

Cloud cost management is the difference between smooth sailing and rough seas when it comes to the monthly expense from your cloud service provider. But when the invoice arrives it’s already too late to curtail unnecessary or wasted cloud spend. The stakes are high as, according to CIO, the cost of computing in the cloud is second only to payroll. Thoroughly tagging resources is the only way to successfully manage your cloud costs.

Visibility

To manage, control, and contain cloud costs you must be able to see your resources. Visibility is acquired through tagging. However, your tags must successfully address the four core tagging challenges to effectively manage cloud spend.

Tag Coverage – tag every resource
Tag Compliance – separately tag every distinct attribute of a resource
Tag Completeness – tag each subcomponent of a resource.
Tag Clarity – eliminate duplicate or mis-spelled tag keys.

Tagging that masters these challenges enables timely and accurate data. Anything less will skew your reports and obfuscate data driven decision making.

Complexity in the Cloud

Organizations in the cloud are configuring increasingly complex cloud infrastructures. Enterprises are multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud, and serverless, employing Kubernetes, container structures with microservices, and so on, all of which create tagging challenges. A common practice for cloud migration has been to “lift and shift,” moving compute resources from on-premises to the cloud but companies struggle with resource tagging due to deficiencies in tooling, talent, and knowledge. The massive amount of time needed to manually tag legacy resources is time that many choose not to invest, presenting a truncated tagging environment with poor visibility and impaired cost allocation capabilities.

Rightsize Like a Boss

Clear visibility into your cloud resources through tagging empowers you to structure your environment for maximum efficiency. Turning off idle resources and rightsizing resources that are either overprovisioned or poorly matched to their workload creates substantial savings. Tagging enables you to identify the resources that benefit from a more efficient architecture. AWS maintains that when you learn how to rightsize, you can save up to 70% percent on your monthly bill, and, according to AWS, rightsizing cloud resources is the most effective way to control cloud costs.

Intelligent Architecture

Comprehensive tagging enables continuous monitoring of resources to determine the most efficient way to allocate them among different use cases. Besides right sizing resources there are other cost saving architectural modifications that become evident with cloud visibility. Autoscaling and scheduling shutdowns for evenings, weekends, and holidays; deleting orphaned volumes; and optimizing block storage volumes are changes that can be executed for cost savings.

Cost Allocation

The most formidable weapon in your cloud cost management arsenal is cost allocation through resource tagging. Cost allocation enables the organization to answer the basic question; Who is spending what? The more completely and accurately an organization tags its cloud resources the more accurate its analysis. Tough decisions regarding costs are made easier by the visibility of trends, key performance metrics and benchmarking. Decisions can be based on real time data rather than intuition. Cost allocation enables disparate teams to manage their own costs, creating greater cost optimization by placing control and accountability in the hands of those making the decisions.

How Do We Get There?

CloudSaver’s innovative SaaS solution, Tag Manager, is fully equipped to tackle your cloud cost management challenges. Its Tag Intelligence dashboard provides you with key metric visibility of your tag environment the moment you connect, along with an assessment of your tag health that provides guidance for correcting any deficiencies. Tag Manager then enables batch processing for efficient and rapid performance of once tedious and time-consuming tasks, including the capability of tagging legacy resources in bulk. Tag Consolidation provides the means to identify and correct tag syntax errors, misspellings, and omissions. Transition your performance from reacting to unexpected cloud costs to proactively forecasting and budgeting your cloud spend.

To clean up your cloud check out Tag Manager today and enjoy a 30-day free trial. As one client stated, “the power of Tag Manager is going to my head!”

Learn more about taming your cloud costs with tagging in these resources:

FEATURE	BENEFIT
Tag Automation & Batch Tag Processing	Employ powerful automation to quickly and accurately tag cloud resources minimizing manual tasks and saving valuable time and effort. Reduce security vulnerabilities and human errors with accurate and swift tagging.
Real-time, Native Cloud Sync	Tag changes are reflected in real-time in native cloud service provider environments. Data is timely and accurate and can be leveraged with additional CloudSaver and third-party tools.
Tag Explorer Query Engine	Utilize our patented filtering and search technology for rapid and efficient location of client data across resources, zones, accounts, and service providers. This capability drastically reduces mean-time-to-resolution by quickly identifying key cloud data. Its deep dive, robust exploration enables you to “find anything.”
Tag Intelligence Dashboards & Tools	Benefit from a guided tag health experience that automatically delivers valuable insights without the need for customized reports or dashboards. These insights cover both your entire tag environment and also specific categories.
Customizable Dashboards	Create customized dashboards to display data according to your specific needs, offering real-time visibility into cloud resources, tags and spend. Obtain timely, accurate, and relevant data for insightful analysis and to identify tagging gaps.
Efficient Tag Remediation	Benefit from suggested, spell-checked tag keys and values – detect and batch merge tag variations.
Legacy Tagging Solutions	Retroactively tag or modify tags on existing legacy resources during cloud migration, either individually or in bulk and eliminate time-consuming manual efforts for smooth integration into your cloud environment.
Multi-Tenant & Multi-Cloud	Manage every cloud data set from a single screen across resources, zones, accounts, and cloud service providers (AWS and Azure).
Tag Policy Compliance Monitoring	Ingest tag policies from native cloud environments to ensure consistent tag syntax and taxonomy.
User Role & Permission Console	Enhance security with Identity and Access Management features contained in the permissions assigned through tagging.
Configuration Management Database (CMDB) Integration	The CloudSaver platform seamlessly incorporates CMDB data related to known cloud infrastructure, offering precise control, efficient tagging, and enhanced visibility by viewing, filtering, and sorting cloud resources based on CMDB data.