Be in charge of your cloud costs with these 2021 releases: CloudSpend recap

The widespread adoption of digital transformation triggered by the global health crisis has created a boom. For some businesses, the transition was smooth, but for others, it was an aggressive shift. Out of all the challenges posed by the transition to digital environments, messy cloud cost management and rocketing cloud bills are the most taxing. According to Gartner, through 2024, 60% of infrastructure and operations leaders will bear cloud costs that hurt their on-premises budgets.

The CloudSpend team devoted our 2021 to doing our part to make your cloud cost management journey efficient. Let's take a stroll through the features CloudSpend released in 2021.

Forecast: Let our predictions help you plan

We all love surprises, don't we? But what about those shocking surprises that accompany AWS bills, leaving a large hole in our pockets? What if there was a solution to avoid that?

A lack of proper planning can bring the worst nightmares along with your monthly cloud bills. In 2021, one of our major feature releases was forecast. With forecast-predicted expenses for the rest of the month, you can make changes to your allocated amounts and plan to avoid month-end overspills. In the case of business units, forecasting acts as a reality check that will analyze the historical data and give a heads-up on whether the expenses will stay within the budget or exceed it. Forecasting thereby helps administrators rightsize their resources or change their plans accordingly.

Budget: Allocate, track, and stay on top of expenses 

Ever lost a piece from your jigsaw puzzle and searched hard to find it just to get a glimpse of the complete picture? Isn't this the same feeling you get when all the AWS bills and budgets are on different platforms? Well, we've got your back. 

A holistic view into the costs accrued and the areas where expenses go overboard is pivotal to keeping cloud costs in check. To this end, we've added a few more essentials to our budgeting feature to give you an in-depth, analytical view of your expenses. 

We've brought in an exhaustive budget details dashboard with a comparative analysis of your current spending, the forecasted value for the rest of the month, and the budgeted value for the specified timestamp. The variance provided lets you understand the deviation from your budget. The daily and forecast (month) options were also added to our range of budget periods. To stay updated, you can now schedule reports for the entire budget dashboard with all your budgets as well as for individual budget details pages.

Budget history: Analyze past expenses to build a foolproof plan

How boring is it to go through bills or budgets from past months individually, not to mention the time that it takes? Here's a little something that will solve this issue.

In 2021, CloudSpend extended the breadth and depth of its budget details page by adding a budget history section. From here, users can obtain historical data regarding all their budgets, including the date, usage value, budgeted value, and deviation. Along with this, we've also brought in the recent alerts section for viewing all recent alerts for a budget. Reports can be scheduled from both of these sections. These sections allow you to analyze your spending patterns, the times expenses were high, and your progress or consistency in sticking to the budget.

Mobile web app: Connect and manage easily

While on your vacation, how cumbersome is it to be glued to your system to sort out matters related to your budgets or bills?

In the current hybrid work model, where some people wish to stay updated even while doing their daily chores or traveling, we believe efficient mobile web apps are a lifesaver. Therefore we rolled out our mobile web application this year to make your cloud cost optimization journey a tad bit easier. Integrate accounts, create budgets, configure budget units, schedule reports, and do much more with ease from your mobile phone.  

In 2021, we also introduced the dark theme for our user interface. We hope all these updates will help you track, view, and manage your expenses better. 

Our 2022 is looking all the more exciting with our eventful CloudSpend roadmap. Read the Site24x7 roadmap for more details regarding other 2022 updates. Stay tuned to gain insights into the latest releases from Site24x7.
 

Here's to a tension-free, well-planned 2022.