As businesses ramp up their investments in cloud infrastructure and applications, reducing cloud related costs is becoming a priority. According to Flexera’s 2025 State of the Cloud Report, more than 84% of enterprise respondents believe that managing cloud spend is the top cloud challenge for organisations today.
Addressing cloud costs is a continual exercise in optimising virtualisation strategies and revisiting what is important. Jeremy Pather, Head of Product: ICT and Energy at Nashua recommends some ways businesses can optimise cloud costs and stretch their IT rand further:
1. Rightsizing and scheduling
Many companies are spending more money on cloud resources than they need to, due to idle capacity and overprovisioning. They can achieve significant savings by making sure that they’re only paying for compute and storage resources they need and use. Solutions such as autoscaling and proactive scheduling can help them avoid paying for idle resources.
2. Leverage analytics and cost‑monitoring tools
There is a growing selection of cost management solutions from cloud providers and third-party software firms that help companies get real-time visibility into cloud spending, along with anomaly alerts and trend forecasts. These analytics and monitoring tools help companies to proactively watch and control their costs, so that they can curb budget overruns. These tools can also be used to track how teams and cost centres in the business use the cloud to drive accountability.
3. Choose the right provider and architecture
Multi-cloud strategies are becoming more popular due to the flexibility companies gain from an optimal mix of public and private cloud solutions. Leading companies are matching provider (private and public cloud) and service types (infrastructure, software and platform as a service) to workloads. The right blend will balance cost, performance, and compliance.
For example, for some customer-facing applications and services, it makes sense to leverage local providers with rand-based billing for the purposes of cutting bandwidth and data egress costs while meeting data sovereignty requirements and reducing latency. But for applications like big data analytics, hyperscale providers might be more cost-efficient.
4. Consolidate and modernise workloads
Retiring or refactoring legacy apps and consolidating similar workloads to eliminate duplication and inefficiencies can be a powerful cost reduction lever. Decommissioning underutilised or outdated systems during cloud migrations can drop cost savings straight to the bottom line. Modern microservices or serverless architectures can be far more efficient than monolithic legacy systems.
5. Stay future-ready
As organisations expand their AI projects, they’ll need more GPU power, which could potentially drive-up cloud costs. Now is the time for companies to be proactive in addressing AI spending spikes. Instituting granular cost‑management and chargeback mechanisms could help keep overall cloud spend visible, controlled, and linked to actual value delivered.
Final thoughts
The cloud continues to be a powerful enabler of innovation, scalability and agility for South African organisations of all sizes. But as with traditional on-premises IT models, cloud consumption needs to be monitored, measured and optimised to ensure the best possible ROI. Cloud costs, if not continuously monitored and optimised, can spiral quickly.
Forward-thinking companies will treat cloud cost management as a strategic imperative rather than a technical afterthought. Partnering with a cloud services provider or systems integrator can help you navigate the complexity, build in cost controls from the start, and extract full value from every rand you invest.
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