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Three cloud-spend management tips leaders should consider lest they “leave money on the table.”  

While cloud computing lets big financial firms quickly scale their IT capabilities, its costs can spiral out of control. Tech leaders need best practices for monitoring and optimizing their budgets.

The cloud frenzy is starting to wear off as companies ogle their bills amid ongoing budget tightening.  

For the first time in over a decade, spend management ranked above cybersecurity as the top challenge enterprises face with the cloud. So how can big financial firms keep costs under control?  

While there’s no one answer, execs at major financial institutions have weighed in on their own tactics.  

For example, Jack Henry CIO Rob Zelinka told The Wall Street Journal that his team scores discounted rates with multiple cloud providers by committing to a certain amount of usage, which requires it to hyper-accurately forecast its compute, so it doesn’t go over (or too far under) its commitments. 

“The last thing we want to do is leave money on the table,” he said. 

Wells Fargo holds daily meetings to review a detailed dashboard that showcases expense trends and identifies anomalies, which helps the team determine if there are workloads that can be paused during off-hours.  

Meanwhile, Capital One told Insider that it uses a tool that automatically moves less-used data into cheaper tiers of storage, which helped it decrease its AWS storage costs by 35%. 

Recent IDC research predicted that 70% of enterprises will become more adept at managing their cloud spend by next year. How is your firm reducing cloud costs? Let us know your tactics by replying to this email.