How Do I Reduce My AWS Costs? Implementing Governance Controls

Author: David Gaffney

Achieving Optimized AWS Governance

The AWS cloud can empower a business in many ways, including increased accessibility, compliance & security, scalability, and flexibility. However, if a business migrates to AWS incorrectly or manages their environment poorly, it can also drag business’s very viability down. The answer to success in AWS, therefore, lies in how an IT team chooses to strategize and execute on their AWS cloud migration, and following the migration, optimize their AWS environment continually. Both in cases of good or poor migration strategies, your ending stance in AWS can have vast impacts on total cost of ownership.

Cost savings in the cloud can be achieved in three key areas: 1) architecture, 2) financial optimization (FinOps) and 3) governance. In this third blog of the series, we’ll cover the governance aspects that involve how implement and iterate control over your critical assets.

What Is Governance?

Governance in the cloud refers to the process of IT policy making and emphasizing cybersecurity and compliance under a single umbrella; it defines what applications are approved for company use and which aren’t. This process also details for the rest of the IT team and business how the development process should occur in the cloud, and how the IT department will track adherence to these policies. Governance controls, therefore, can refer to the tools that the IT team uses to both iterate and track company technology operations.

When created and applied correctly in the cloud, your AWS governance doesn’t have to slow down development and operations. In fact, it can act as an accelerator, adding speed to a process that normally would require the cybersecurity team to review applications before or shortly after being released. With a strong governance approach, the security guardrails are clear, the compliance is assured, and the DevOps team can run as fast as they like.

AWS governance controls, when implemented and optimized, can do the following for a business:

Drive greater flexibility and scalability for builders
Provision resources and applications that are pre-approved for use
Operate with assurance of security, allowing for the greatest speed
Enable a strong ecosystem of third-party solutions

AWS Tools for Governance

If you’ve migrated and organized your AWS environment with adherence to the AWS Well-Architected Framework, you can use a lot of native AWS tools to empower your company’s governance, which include the following:

AWS Control Tower
AWS Organizations
AWS Budgets
AWS License Manager
AWS Cloud Formation
AWS Service Catalog
AWS OpsWorks
AWS CloudWatch
AWS CloudTrail
AWS X-Ray

Gaining Visibility of Everything

One of the trickiest areas of cloud computing is knowing how much to provision where and when, what your spending rate is, and whether anything needs attention—all in one place for easy visibility and fast action. This is where InterVision’s proprietary, customizable dashboard can help to provide both business and technical level insights.

The dashboard is part of InterVision’s Cloud Cost Optimization Service, which helps midsize and enterprise organizations simplify the financial complexity of cloud adoption and relieve high-demand staff from cost management operations. With an SLA-backed guarantee to identify 30% or more savings on monthly AWS costs (restrictions apply; contact InterVision for info), our unique approach exceeds competitive offerings by combining deep expertise in cloud architecture and sophisticated Financial Operations (FinOps) to deliver dramatically more savings than traditional AWS savings plans.

The dashboard provides insights in six key areas: