The cloud offers a robust foundation for eCommerce businesses, expected to grow to a $180 billion market by 2030. The growing demand for integrated solutions, adoption of AI for personalized experiences, and cost-effective IT infrastructure drive this growth.

However, as retail organizations embrace new cloud models to scale their omnichannel eCommerce strategies, they end with monthly humongous cloud bills. With the cloud expected to optimize expenses, these bills seem counterproductive. This is why cloud cost optimization is critical for eCommerce businesses looking to make the most of the cloud without compromising performance.

The Cloud Cost Challenges

The cloud enables eCommerce businesses to grow and scale their operations without interruption. From AI and machine learning for personalized customer experiences to big data analytics for real-time inventory management and customer insights, cloud computing offers several building blocks to streamline operations, enhance flexibility, and boost resilience.

However, as eCommerce businesses increase their dependence on the cloud, they face the unavoidable challenge of high cloud costs. This happens due to several reasons, including:

• Poor planning: The eCommerce ecosystem comprises several departments and teams with different goals and objectives. These departments invest in other cloud solutions because it is easy to build new instances. Such siloed planning and implementation of cloud instances leads to uncontrollable cloud costs and complex management.
• Poor budgeting: Many eCommerce businesses do not know how much they spend or where. Poor budgeting, clubbed with poor analysis of cloud bills, blows out the original budget estimates for resources. When unanticipated cloud projects show up, these businesses have even higher bills.
• Lack of real-time monitoring: Cloud adoption is often considered a one-time project. Lack of real-time monitoring leads to poor insight into instances, making it difficult for eCommerce businesses to identify instances not used, abandoned, or not needed.
• Complex pricing and billing: Cloud contracts are often complex, with several variable parameters. eCommerce businesses usually have difficulty reading and understanding billing models and pricing structures with myriad options and combinations, leading to a lack of understanding in selecting the best pricing option. Complex cloud discounting structures and payment schedules also lead to confusion and underutilization of discounting mechanisms.
• Changing needs: Changing market and customer needs cause eCommerce businesses to quickly scale up or down their cloud workloads to meet varying demands. Without proper autoscaling scaling measures, they face the challenge of oversizing compute units or abandoned resources idling away – which adds to costs.
• Unused workloads: Lack of centralized management of cloud workloads also leads to unnecessary costs. Since businesses cannot easily detect overprovisioned environments or unused workloads, they are compelled to pay for that excess resource monthly,

Tips for eCommerce Cloud Cost Optimization

Investments in cloud computing require careful planning and effective management. eCommerce businesses need effective strategies and tools to keep cloud expenses in check, better manage cloud resources, and minimize waste. Here are some practical ways to achieve optimal cloud cost management without compromising performance or security.

• Identify underutilized/unnecessary/idle resources: One of the best ways to optimize cloud costs is to look for underutilized and unused resources. Regular monitoring of cloud usage can help administrators determine servers that weren’t de-provisioned after a temporary task or remove the storage attached to terminated instances, helping curtail cloud bills.
• Right-size instances: Right-sizing cloud instances allows eCommerce businesses to analyze services and modify them to the most efficient size. Using automated tools, they can get recommendations on required storage capacity and throughput options, thereby reducing cloud costs, optimizing cloud usage, and driving peak performance from existing resources.
• Centralize cloud management: Centralizing cloud cost management offers an efficient, scalable way to gain visibility across various cloud environments. By unearthing key insights into cloud services’ performance, costs, compliance, and security, eCommerce businesses can optimize expenses, curtail sprawl, and ensure cloud usage doesn’t go unchecked.
• Enable autoscaling to adjust resources based on demand: Autoscaling can help eCommerce firms automatically adjust capacity to maintain predictable performance at lower costs. They can set up application scaling for multiple resources across multiple services in minutes and ensure their eCommerce site always has the right resources at the right time.
• Build a multi-cloud strategy: Building a multi-cloud strategy is another plausible way of keeping cloud costs in check. A multi-cloud strategy can help avoid vendor lock-in costs while enabling eCommerce businesses to spread costs across different cloud environments. For example, they can use private clouds to store sensitive customer information and public clouds for daily operations – thus minimizing overhead costs and enjoying the flexibility to scale resources based on their requirements.
• Invest in modern monitoring tools: The right cloud cost management tools can enable eCommerce companies to optimize spending and continuously reduce their cloud bills. Using AI and automation, these tools can provide real-time visibility into cloud usage, optimize the return on cloud investment, and ensure that applications always have the cloud resources they need to perform.
• Ensure cloud-native design: Adopting a cloud-native approach can help eCommerce companies eliminate costly investments in procuring and maintaining expensive physical infrastructure. This results in long-term operational expenditure savings while enabling them to respond to changing customer demands with agility and resilience.

Conclusion

Increased data processing, storage, and availability needs have eCommerce businesses increasingly rely on cloud infrastructure. However, the flexibility and scalability that make the cloud attractive also make cloud costs unpredictable and challenging to manage. Understanding the need for cloud cost optimization and investing in the right tools and approaches can enable eCommerce businesses to monitor usage, identify unused or idle resources, and ensure maximum ROI from their cloud investments.