Ultimate Guide to Multi-Cloud Cost Savings

Managing multi-cloud costs can be complex, but it’s essential to avoid overspending. Businesses in the UK face challenges like poor cost visibility, billing complexity, and hidden fees, leading to wasted cloud budgets. On average, organisations overspend by 17% annually, with 32% of cloud spending wasted due to inefficiencies. This guide highlights actionable methods to optimise multi-cloud costs:

• Unified Cost Management Tools: Consolidate billing data across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud for better tracking and budgeting.
• Rightsizing Resources: Avoid over-provisioning by aligning resources with actual needs, saving up to 32% of cloud spend.
• Automation: Use automated policies to shut down idle resources and enforce budget thresholds, reducing waste by up to 70%.
• Workload Placement: Strategically allocate workloads to minimise costs, considering regional pricing and performance needs.
• AI & Predictive Analytics: Leverage AI to predict usage patterns, detect inefficiencies, and optimise resource allocation, cutting costs by up to 30%.

Expert consulting services, like Hokstad Consulting, can help businesses implement these strategies, offering tailored solutions and continuous support. With the right approach, UK organisations can reduce cloud costs while maintaining performance and compliance.

Multicloud Cost Optimization at Scale | CoreStack

Main Challenges in Multi-Cloud Cost Management

Managing costs across multiple cloud platforms isn’t just about keeping track of bills - it’s about navigating a maze of differing billing systems, hidden charges, and visibility gaps. These challenges can easily disrupt budgets and complicate financial planning, setting the stage for the cost-saving strategies discussed later.

Complex and Different Billing Systems

Every cloud provider has its own way of structuring bills, making it tricky for finance teams to consolidate data. AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure each use distinct billing formats [1], which complicates efforts to combine spending information into a single, unified view.

On top of that, billing cycles don’t always align, making real-time comparisons difficult. Cost allocation is another headache. Google Cloud Platform separates costs for compute and memory, whereas AWS and Azure bundle these into total resource consumption [1]. This inconsistency forces organisations to spend extra time and effort interpreting their bills.

Discount programmes add yet another layer of complexity. AWS offers Reserved Instances, Azure has Reserved Savings, and Google Cloud provides Committed Use Discounts [3]. While all three aim to lower costs for long-term commitments, their terms, durations, and eligibility criteria differ significantly. Even per-second billing, available on all three platforms, comes with varying minimum limits and conditions [3].

Data Transfer and Hidden Costs

One of the biggest cost surprises in multi-cloud setups comes from moving data between providers or regions. Cloud providers charge data egress fees whenever data leaves their networks [4], and these charges can pile up quickly if not carefully monitored.

For instance, transferring 50 TB of data per month at £0.07 per GB results in a hefty £3,500 bill [4]. For UK organisations regularly syncing large datasets across platforms, these fees can eat up a significant chunk of their cloud budgets.

Outbound data transfer fees typically start at around £0.07 per GB after the first 1 GB [4]. Many businesses only realise the scale of these costs once cross-cloud traffic becomes substantial. While Azure might offer cheaper storage options, other factors - like data transfer or operations charges - can make it less economical overall [3].

Hidden costs like these are a major contributor to waste. Around 32% of cloud spending is wasted due to inefficiencies [4], with data transfer fees being a big culprit.

Poor Visibility and Governance

Managing costs in a multi-cloud environment isn’t just a financial challenge - it’s also a visibility and governance issue. Effective cost management requires FinOps expertise and a deep understanding of how each cloud platform operates [5]. Unfortunately, there’s no single tool that provides a unified view across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

This lack of visibility creates operational hurdles. Teams often rely on multiple tools to monitor cloud usage, increasing staffing costs and reducing efficiency [6]. Without a centralised view, organisations struggle to enforce consistent spending policies across platforms.

Enterprises can push multi-cloud enablement by striving for a single-pane-of-glass view into their disparate cloud environments. Without a comprehensive and centralised view, organisations will mistakenly assume separate management of multiple cloud infrastructures and risk governance and security in the process.

• Vibhuti Sinha, Chief Product Officer at Saviynt [7]

Fragmented management also leads to silos, making it harder to maintain cost controls. Resources are often provisioned and forgotten, resulting in ongoing charges for unused services [6]. This issue is compounded by the difficulty of discovering all organisational assets in real time.

Security is another area impacted by reduced visibility. Different services across cloud platforms can create gaps, leaving organisations vulnerable to security incidents [5]. When breaches occur due to poor oversight, the cost of remediation can far outweigh any savings achieved through multi-cloud strategies.

Over 75% of organisations now use multiple public cloud services [7], yet many lack the governance frameworks needed to manage costs effectively. Addressing these challenges is a crucial first step toward achieving better cost control.

Multi-Cloud Cost Optimisation Methods

Managing costs across multiple cloud platforms can feel overwhelming, but with the right strategies, you can turn disorganised spending into well-managed efficiency. By combining tools, processes, and automation, businesses can achieve better control over their cloud expenses and see measurable improvements.

Unified Cost Management Tools

Dealing with multiple billing systems can be a headache. That’s where unified cost management tools come in. These tools provide a single dashboard that consolidates billing data from providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. This is crucial, especially since 82% of IT professionals cite high costs as their biggest cloud challenge [9]. With a unified view, finance teams can track resource usage, set budgets, and identify cost-saving opportunities more effectively.

By simplifying the complexity of managing separate billing systems, these tools lay the groundwork for better financial management across multiple clouds. They help streamline processes and make it easier to spot inefficiencies, ultimately leading to significant savings.

Rightsizing and Resource Optimisation

Over-provisioning is a common issue that eats into cloud budgets, with companies wasting up to 32% of their cloud spend on resources they don’t fully use [10]. Rightsizing tackles this by ensuring resources are aligned with actual workload needs. This involves analysing workloads to choose the most cost-effective pricing models, whether it’s reserved instances, spot instances, or on-demand options.

Specialised tools like StormForge can continuously optimise Kubernetes workloads, delivering savings of 40–60% [8]. Auto-scaling adds another layer of efficiency by adjusting resources dynamically based on real-time demand. This ensures your systems remain highly available while keeping costs under control [15].

Additionally, effective tagging and labelling of resources simplify expense tracking and improve oversight [11]. Since business needs evolve, regular monitoring and adjustments are crucial to maintaining cost efficiency over time.

Automation and Governance for Cost Control

Automation offers a practical solution to the challenges of visibility and governance across multiple cloud providers. Interestingly, only one in three companies achieves their expected cloud savings [13]. Automated systems can help by enforcing cost governance policies, setting budget thresholds, shutting down idle resources, and alerting teams to unusual spending.

For instance, organisations can save up to 70% on non-production costs by automatically detecting and shutting down idle resources [14]. Governance-as-Code also ensures that policies are enforced in real-time and issues are resolved automatically [14].

Leverage automated governance and financial controls to realise the ROI of your hybrid FinOps strategy.
– Flexera [12]

Automation can also handle discount management, making sure that reserved instance recommendations, spot instance bidding, and committed use discounts are optimised based on usage forecasts. Intelligent budget alerts can catch unusual spending patterns early, preventing costs from spiralling out of control.

For UK businesses adopting multi-cloud strategies, automation not only reduces manual effort but also brings predictability to cloud spending. By integrating FinOps practices, organisations can foster a culture that prioritises cost awareness and collaboration [11]. With these foundational controls in place, businesses can explore more advanced techniques to refine their cost management further.

Advanced Cost Saving Techniques

Building on unified management and automation, let’s explore some advanced methods that can transform cloud spending. These approaches tackle specific inefficiencies and fine-tune your cost-saving efforts.

Workload Placement Optimisation

Strategic workload placement is a highly effective way to reduce costs while maintaining performance. This involves allocating applications across environments based on factors like cost, performance, and compliance needs. Consider this: an estimated £44.5 billion in underutilised resources will go to waste this year, accounting for 21% of total cloud expenditure [16].

By carefully matching workloads to the right environment, you can maximise savings. For example, latency-sensitive applications often perform better on-premises or at edge locations, while burstable workloads can take advantage of lower-cost public cloud resources during off-peak times. Data-heavy applications may benefit from hybrid setups, balancing cost and performance effectively. Regional pricing differences also offer significant savings opportunities. For instance, AWS charges approximately £0.11 per gigabyte for outbound data transfer from the São Paulo region, compared to just £0.01/GB from the Ohio region [18]. Moving workloads to regions with lower costs and using spot instances can reduce expenses by about 19% [21].

Reducing Data Transfer Costs

Data transfer costs, especially egress fees, can quickly add up in multi-cloud environments. These costs arise when data moves between cloud providers, across regions, or out to the internet. For example, transferring 2 petabytes of data (1PB in and 1PB out) could cost over £70,000 per month - adding up to around £840,000 annually [17].

Managing egress costs effectively can cut cloud spending by as much as 30% [20]. One key strategy is to keep data close to the applications that use it. Storing data on the same platform, service, and region as the application reduces unnecessary transfer fees. Content delivery networks (CDNs) like Amazon CloudFront can also help by caching frequently accessed content closer to users, cutting down on repeated transfers from origin servers and lowering both costs and latency.

For businesses that frequently move data between clouds, private connectivity solutions can offer substantial savings. Using a network fabric can reduce data transfer fees by more than 60% compared to standard internet egress [17]. Additionally, data compression tools like Granica Crunch can cut transfer costs by up to 60% for large-scale analytical, AI, and machine learning data sets [19].

Using AI and Predictive Analytics

AI is changing the game when it comes to cloud cost optimisation. AI-powered predictive models can help reduce unnecessary spending by up to 30% [21]. By analysing historical usage data, these models enable more accurate scaling and ensure resource allocation matches actual demand. For example, LSTM-based models reduce prediction errors by an average of 18% compared to traditional statistical models like ARIMA [21].

AI models such as VAE and Isolation Forest can detect anomalies with 91% precision, improving resource utilisation by 30% and cutting costs by 27% [21]. Machine learning algorithms, including Deep Q Network (DQN) and Proximal Policy Optimisation (PPO), further automate cost-saving measures by identifying redundant services and enforcing rightsizing policies. AI-driven log analysis can also streamline operations, reducing cloud expenses by 25% through optimised resource allocation [21].

AI tools also help businesses balance regional pricing with performance, ensuring the best possible cost efficiency.

These advanced techniques do require thoughtful implementation and continuous monitoring, but the potential savings make them well worth the effort. Hokstad Consulting has expertise in applying these strategies, helping businesses achieve cost reductions of 30–50%.

How Consulting Helps Multi-Cloud Cost Optimisation

Effectively managing multi-cloud environments is no small feat, especially since many businesses lack the in-house expertise to do so. With multi-cloud strategies becoming the norm and organisations often overspending due to inefficiencies, consulting services have emerged as a key solution for cutting costs. Here's how expert consulting transforms these challenges into measurable savings.

Custom Solutions for UK Businesses

UK businesses face distinct hurdles when it comes to managing multi-cloud costs. From navigating GDPR compliance to dealing with regional pricing differences among cloud providers, the complexities can be daunting. Specialist consultants bring local expertise to the table, designing strategies that align with both regulatory and operational needs. By unifying billing systems and standardising tagging, they enhance cost visibility and streamline operations.

Multi-cloud cost management is one of the biggest challenges when working with multi-cloud infrastructures, but it doesn't have to be.

• Yotascale [22]

Take Hokstad Consulting, for example. They specialise in crafting bespoke cloud cost engineering solutions tailored to UK businesses. Their services, which include in-depth cloud cost audits, strategic migration plans, and ongoing optimisation, have helped clients cut expenses by 30–50%. By focusing on custom strategies and continuous monitoring, Hokstad ensures these savings are not just achieved but sustained over time.

Continuous Support and Audits

One-off cost-cutting measures rarely lead to long-term savings. Effective multi-cloud cost management demands ongoing monitoring and periodic audits to catch inefficiencies as they arise. This continuous approach ensures that cost reductions are maintained and even improved over time.

Regular audits help identify underutilised resources and offer precise rightsizing recommendations [22]. They also involve budgeting and forecasting cloud expenditures to prevent costs from spiralling out of control. With 31% of companies reportedly spending over £25 million annually on public cloud services [2], these measures are more critical than ever.

Hokstad Consulting provides flexible engagement options, including retainer-based support for ongoing infrastructure management. They also offer a No Savings, No Fee model, where fees are tied to the actual savings achieved. This ensures businesses only pay when they see tangible results.

Real Results from Expert Consulting

The benefits of professional consulting in multi-cloud cost management are tangible and far-reaching. Experts help businesses optimise resource allocation, automate cost controls, and monitor usage in real time to reduce waste [2]. They also implement workload placement strategies that balance cost, performance, and compliance, while minimising unnecessary data transfer fees and automating scaling to meet changing demands [23][24].

Hokstad Consulting exemplifies these advantages through services like DevOps transformation with automated CI/CD pipelines, zero-downtime cloud migrations, and advanced caching solutions. Their clients benefit from faster deployment cycles, enhanced security through regular audits, and substantial cost savings driven by expert optimisation techniques.

Conclusion and Key Points

Navigating the challenges of billing complexities, hidden fees, and underused resources can feel daunting. But mastering multi-cloud cost management doesn’t have to be overwhelming. With the right tools and strategies, UK businesses can secure significant savings while maintaining top-tier performance.

Summary of Multi-Cloud Cost Saving Methods

The most effective cost-saving strategies seamlessly blend technical expertise with strategic insights. Key pillars include consolidated billing, resource optimisation, and automation. These approaches lay the groundwork for long-term savings that grow over time.

Advanced methods, such as workload placement optimisation and AI-driven predictive analytics, elevate cost management to a higher level. By carefully aligning workloads with cost, performance, and compliance needs, businesses can cut data transfer fees and maximise the value of their cloud investments. Importantly, these techniques work best when integrated into a cohesive strategy rather than treated as standalone efforts.

The Cost Optimisation Service combines technical data with consulting expertise to identify cloud/multi-cloud costs and determine a more cost-effective solution whilst still meeting business needs. - Company85 LTD [25]

The Value of Expert Guidance

Expert consultants play a crucial role in bridging the gap between complex technical challenges and business goals. Armed with both tools and know-how, they help businesses take control of their cloud costs. This includes finding quick wins for immediate savings and offering structural advice for ongoing cost reduction [25].

The results speak for themselves. For example, Protiviti helped a global financial services firm save approximately £1.6 million within just 30 days by implementing a Cloud FinOps programme strategy [26]. This highlights how expert guidance can deliver immediate results while laying the groundwork for sustained optimisation.

For UK businesses, localised consulting services, such as Hokstad Consulting, provide tailored solutions that address regulatory and market-specific challenges. Their No Savings, No Fee model ensures businesses only pay when measurable savings are achieved, making expert advice accessible even for those with tight budgets. This approach ensures immediate improvements without financial risk.

Next Steps for Achieving Long-Term Savings

To maintain and expand your savings, start with real-time monitoring of your resource usage and cloud spending. Effective cloud cost management is an ongoing process that requires regular adjustments as workloads and business needs evolve [27]. Consistent tagging is another essential step to keep spending transparent and well-organised.

Encouraging collaboration across departments is equally important. Cost awareness should be embedded across all stages, from design to budgeting. Finance teams can use cloud cost data for better financial planning, while DevOps teams should consider costs during the design and deployment phases [27]. Setting realistic budgets based on historical data and future trends ensures you’re prepared for growth and changing demands.

If you want to accelerate these efforts, consider bringing in expert consultants. While consulting fees typically range from £600 to £1,600 per day [25], the potential savings far outweigh the costs. Professional guidance can help you establish the right people, processes, and technologies to keep your cloud strategy efficient and cost-effective in the long run.

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