Latest / Connectivity Without Chaos - The Podcast / Why Your Cloud Bill Is Growing Faster Than Your Business—and How to Flip the Script

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Why Your Cloud Bill Is Growing Faster Than Your Business—and How to Flip the Script · Connectivity Without Chaos - The Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Imagine leaving the air conditioning running like full blast in
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: a massive 50 room mansion that you don't even live in.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that would be completely insane.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: Every single month you're writing this massive check for space you aren't even using.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: OK, let's unpack this,
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: because if you manage anything digital,
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: that is exactly what your company might be doing in the cloud right now.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, absolutely.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's really the ultimate corporate blind spot.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: So today we're doing a deep dive
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: into how organizations can stop this invisible bleeding of money
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: and build real financial accountability.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because right now, you know, you're generating these massive utility bills.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: But since every developer essentially has like an unlimited corporate credit card
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: to just spin up servers whenever they want.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: The organization just completely loses track of the property.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: So to fix this cloud budget leak, we really have to look at the root cause.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: Which comes down to a pretty brutal truth, actually.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: Cloud costs just grow much faster than business value when nobody actually owns the spend.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: And if you look at the data, three central questions always emerge.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: First, where is the money even going?
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: Because most organizations can't even map their spend back to specific teams or apps.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Which naturally leads to the whole panic provisioning problem.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Developers are terrified of an app crashing under load.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: So they overpay for massive capacity they never actually use.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: So when companies are forced to ask the second question, are we overpaying?
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: The answer is almost always yes.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: You just end up with idle resources sitting there.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: Oversized instances doing nothing.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: But wait, let me push back on this a bit.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: I thought the whole promise of cloud computing was that it's inherently designed
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: to be automatically efficient and cost effective.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Well, in theory.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: Like you only pay for what you use, right?
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: In theory, yes.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: But what you use and what you actually need are, well, often two very different things.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: The cloud removes all friction, you know.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, all friction, just click a button.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: And spin up core computing power like an Amazon EC2 instance in literal seconds.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: But without governance, they just keep spinning things up and forget to turn them off.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's decentralized spending without centralized oversight.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: Which naturally brings up the third question organizations eventually face.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: Is the spend actually worth it?
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: Because if you have all these forgotten idle servers running, the answer is probably no.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: What's fascinating here is how mature phenops shifts that conversation entirely.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: How so?
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: It moves away from just like playing whack-a-mole with cloud bills and merely cutting costs.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, it pivots to forcing developers and finance teams to speak the exact same language.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: Ah, so cost becomes a core metric of code quality.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: Connecting that spend directly to actual business outcomes.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so once a company realizes the AC is blasting in the empty mansion,
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: how is this actually solved across complex, real-world digital estates?
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: I know enterprise-grade dashboards for visibility are the first step.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, along with monthly expert reviews to actually interpret that data.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: Right, but I was looking at some of the discount figures and they seem wild.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: I saw you can get up to 30% off EC2 without even locking into a massive multi-year contract.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: How is that even possible?
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: What's the loophole there?
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's not really a loophole so much as it is pooling buying power.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: Individual teams or even mid-sized companies,
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: they just don't have the leverage to demand wholesale rates from cloud providers.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: Makes sense.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: But by utilizing partner pricing,
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: you're essentially pooling your spend with hundreds of other companies.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, wow.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that collective bargaining unlocks those hidden discounts.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: You can easily trim up to 5% off the overall cloud bill just through economies of scale.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: So it's less about finding a secret coupon code and more
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: about leveraging collective bargaining.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: Combined with Ashley downgrading servers that are only operating at like 10 percent capacity.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: And getting to that point starts with a quick one to two week assessment
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: to benchmark the current spend right before you move into designing the governance
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: and all that ongoing management.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: You have to establish a baseline.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: You can't fix what you can't see.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: And that unified view needs to cover everything.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I noticed that strategy explicitly covers private clouds too, like VMware.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: Which makes me wonder, why spend time modeling VMware costs?
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: The tech world is totally obsessed with public clouds right now.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: Isn't private cloud kind of old news?
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Not for enterprise scale, no.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: Doing capacity planning and true cost modeling for VMware alongside public cloud is crucial.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: Really?
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: It prevents over-provisioning across the board.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: You aren't just saving money.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: You're creating a single source of truth for the entire company's infrastructure.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: Ensuring every single application is running on the most economical platform.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: If a company is weighing licensing changes,
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: they need to model the true cost of staying, moving, or mixing environments.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: So it's about having one unified view of the spend no matter where the workload lives.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: So what does this all mean for you listening right now?
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: If you manage, build, or oversee anything digital, remember this.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: Unowned resources will quietly but relentlessly eat your margins.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the lack of a decision to turn something off is still a decision to keep paying for it.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: Which brings us back to our air-conditioned mansion.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: If a simple one
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: to two week fine ops assessment can uncover massive corporate waste hidden in
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: the cloud,
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: what automated subscriptions or idle digital tools
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: in your own life are quietly draining your wallet right now simply
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: because you haven't explicitly chosen to turn them off?