The migration towards multi-cloud environments has become increasingly prevalent due to the consistent availability and resilience of resources and storage. Each cloud service provider boasts intricate pricing structures, offerings, and unique features. However, this shift brings a daunting challenge: managing and optimizing costs across multiple providers. 

This is where multi-cloud cost management tools come to the rescue. While numerous multi-cloud cost management tools focus on compute resource optimization, there is an urgent need for ones that optimize storage usage. Hence, you must invest in multiple tools focusing on optimizing compute and storage resources.

This blog has compiled our top 16 multi-cloud cost management tools. Each tool focuses on a different multi-cloud cost management facet- compute resources or storage usage. Shortlist the ones that best suit your business’s requirements.

Multi-cloud refers to an enterprise's strategic utilization of multiple public clouds, encompassing diverse purposes such as hosting applications and resources. Within this framework, organizations distribute workloads across various cloud providers, each offering distinct features tailored to specific enterprise goals.

These objectives may include ensuring redundancy, securing cost discounts, enhancing operational efficiency, or adhering to specific regulatory requirements. This approach provides businesses with unparalleled flexibility, allowing them to mitigate risks associated with relying on a single cloud provider. 

By embracing a multi-cloud strategy, companies gain heightened control and agility over their cloud computing initiatives, empowering them to adapt and optimize their resources in response to evolving business needs.

In our previous blogs, we have comprehensively covered the problems of managing a single cloud service provider. Imagine how challenging cost management can be in a multi-cloud environment. A report by Virtana suggests that while 80% of organizations use multi-cloud service providers, they face trouble visualizing and controlling costs across multiple public and private clouds.

To effectively manage multi-cloud costs, businesses implement numerous multi-cloud cost management tools to optimize compute resources. However, they ignore one of the significant contributors to the cloud cost- storage usage. 

What can be the impact of ignoring storage usage and its associated cost?

Failing to optimize storage in a multi-cloud environment could lead to the following issues:

• High cost: If you don't optimize your storage usage, you may pay for more storage than you need, increasing your cloud expenses. Cloud providers charge based on the amount of storage used, so if you aren't optimizing your usage, you may spend more than you should.
• Wasted resources: A poor cloud storage allocation can lead to wasted resources. This affects your budget and strains the cloud infrastructure, reducing its performance.
• Data redundancy and confusion: By not optimizing, you may create redundant copies of data, leading to confusion and inconsistencies, making it difficult to determine which copy is the most current.
• Resource constraints: An inefficient storage strategy can limit the scalability and flexibility of multi-cloud environments.
• Vendor lock-in: Data and applications may become tightly coupled with a specific cloud provider if storage services aren't optimized. This can cause vendor lock-in and limit your ability to migrate to different platforms.

While it is clear that unoptimized storage can lead to many issues, instead of making conscious efforts to optimize it, businesses tend to overprovision the resources to stay safe if storage demand increases/decreases.

Wondering why?

This is because:

• Optimizing storage in multi-cloud environments can be challenging, considering the limitations of off-the-shelf tools provided by cloud service providers (CSPs). The lack of comprehensive features often necessitates the development of custom tools. However, this custom tool development can substantially increase DevOps efforts and optimization time.
• On the other hand, using only CSP-provided tools can result in suboptimal storage management because they lack the automation and intelligence required for efficient optimization, making it highly manual and resource-intensive. Due to its time and resource consumption, this manual approach cannot be sustained daily.

Due to the reasons mentioned above, and in an attempt to maintain the uptime, businesses prefer overprovisioning the resources. Overprovisioning the resources results in:

• Excessive spending: When you overprovision cloud resources, you're paying for resources that aren't fully utilized. Multi-cloud environments involve multiple cloud providers, which can compound this issue and increase overall expenditures.
• Impact on total cost of ownership: Overprovisioning can increase your total cost of ownership as your multi-cloud setup grows over time, making it less cost-effective than a well-optimized and correctly sized cloud infrastructure.
• Inefficient Scaling: Overprovisioning can inhibit the ability to adjust resources efficiently as workloads change. As a result, your multi-cloud environment will be unable to adapt to dynamic requirements as effectively as possible.
• Decreased ROI: When you overprovision your multi-cloud strategy, you reduce the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the strategy, reducing your return on investment.

While there is an abundance of multi cloud cost management tools that focus on commute resource optimization, the aforementioned negative impact of overprovisioning can be mitigated through such tools that focus on storage optimization. Hence, in your search for the right multi-cloud cost management tool, you should look for:

For tools that enable compute resource optimization, focus on the following aspects:

• It must assist in resource tagging/labeling support organizations to tag and label cloud resources for cost allocation and chargeback management.
• It should provide cost optimization recommendations according to the identified cloud usage patterns, such as rightsizing, reserved instances, and spot instances.
• Resource management should encompass lifecycle management from start to end. Provision everything from deployment to scale-out/scale-in while managing all resources for better utilization through their lifespan. It helps not only set up but also maintain efficiency.
• It should be possible to make customized alerts/notifications and communicate about any essential cost event, such as exceeding the budget or some unpredicted cost increase.
• It should connect with the cloud APIs and other tools to automate the cost movement and exchange data smoothly.

For tools that focus on optimizing cloud storage, look for the following features:

• It should be able to utilize automation to optimize resources in block storage, like on AWS's EBS, Azure disks, and GCP persistent volumes. Concentrate on activities, for instance, resizing volumes and removing outdated or excess snapshots.
• It should be able to offer sizing recommendations based on actual usage patterns. It should help avoid paying too much for storage space that you may not use. The system should change volume, increasing or decreasing, while maintaining no downtime.
• Irrespective of whether your infrastructure is big or small, it should be able to expand/shrink your storage resources whenever required.
• It should ensure that only authorized users can see, edit, or change storage cost data or settings; role-based access control has been implemented.
• It should ensure that policies and security standards are adhered.

When looking for FinOps tools that help monitor and report cloud costs to provide comprehensive insights, look for the following characteristics.

• It should allow for the management of charges across clouds that can help control spending across multi-cloud or hybrid sites.
• It should provide budget notifications and send alerts when an expense approaches or exceeds the threshold levels of a budget.
• It should ensure the correct allocation of cloud costs to departments, teams, and projects for the correct usage accounting.
• It should show a spending analysis per cloud service or resource. An organization gains power over its expenditure through this granular breakdown and can channel its optimization efforts toward strategic priorities.
• It should fine grain cost that allows companies to follow trends in their spending patterns over time.
• It should specify budgetary allocations by departments/teams/projects or cost centers to adequately track expenditures and account for billback or showback requests.
• It should enable building a custom dashboard for using your cloud finances' most relevant cost and usage metrics.
• It should offer tracking of historical cost and usage for trend identification and pattern changes over time toward optimized cost management for the long term.
• It should provide anomaly detection techniques to spot shocking hikes in costs in time for analysis and action.

Considering those above, we bring you a list of multi-cloud cost management tools based on this category.

Top Multi-Cloud Cost Management Tools

Let us look at some multi-cloud cost management tools you can invest in to simplify your cloud cost optimization journey.

1. Lucidity For Storage Optimization

As organizations strive to balance performance, cost-effectiveness, and scalability, efficient storage optimization has become a top priority. It is crucial to have a well-structured storage strategy to minimize cloud-related expenses, ensure data security, and enhance operational efficiency.

Lucidity offers Storage Audit and a Block Storage Auto-Scaler that seamlessly integrates with your cloud infrastructure and helps optimize storage costs without downtime. Being a cloud-first NoOps solution provider, we at Lucidity take immense pride in being the driving force for Fortune 500 companies like SpartanNash and American Airlines on their multi-cloud cost management journey.

To come up with our solutions- Storage Audit and Block Storage Auto-Scaler, we conducted research and found that most companies adopting multi-cloud storage are struggling with the following:

• Hyperbolized Storage: Instead of scaling up and down with the increasing/decreasing requirements, organizations are overestimating the disk growth, resulting in them paying for unused or underutilized resources.

• Downtime: The lack of comprehensive features in the cloud service providers demands custom tool development, leading to increased time and effort from your DevOps team, causing downtime in case of a spike in traffic/workload. Additionally, organizations often overlook enabling monitoring agents or setting up triggering alerts, delaying necessary actions and further contributing to downtime.
• Manual block storage management: Block storage management is tricky, to say the least, and trying to do it manually means leaving room for significant errors. For instance, in AWS, shrinking EBS manually requires 7 different manual operations, such as backing up data, creating a new smaller volume, detaching the original volume, etc. This means significant wastage of time, which will reflect on productivity.

We further refined our research to find out the reasons for problems with capacity management, and we found out that:

• Buffer: Manual block storage management requires a buffer period to ensure accurate data migration and that the applications work correctly with resized volume. This means you need a certain amount of time between different scales, which can be an average of 6 hours.

• Over-estimating the growth: We understand the concern behind organizations preparing themselves for the future and overprovisioning the disk, especially when the load is at its peak. But this overprovisioning means you are paying for the resources you are not utilizing. Moreover, overprovisioning limits your ability to scale when you want to add more instances or increase resource allocation per instance.
• Impact of the traditional approach: When expanding storage resources, conventional methods often result in either overprovisioning, which wastes valuable resources, or underprovisioning, which can cause performance bottlenecks.

What do we have to offer?

We at Lucidity understand that while the storage cost accounts for 20-30% of the total cloud cost, it is still being ignored. Moreover, traditional cloud cost management techniques attempt to balance overprovisioning and underprovisioning, often leading to downtime or performance issues. 

To resolve this cloud cost management issue, we have designed an enterprise-grade, industry-first, state-of-the-art, and autonomous multi-cloud block storage layer that automates capacity planning to ensure multi-cloud storage management. With our Block Storage Auto-Scaler, you can shrink or expand your live block storage according to the workload without any downtime and reduce the storage cost by up to 70%.

It works as an intelligence layer atop your cloud storage vendor and the block storage, ensuring no manual intervention is required for capacity management. Moreover, with our Block Storage Auto-Scaler, you can rest assured that your provisioning will be automated; hence, you will never run out of space.

Whether you're facing unexpected surges in traffic or enhancing cost-efficiency during low-activity periods, our Block Storage Auto-Scaler is your smart answer. Your storage capacity is dynamically fine-tuned, ensuring optimum performance and cost-effectiveness are balanced. With three simple clicks, you can cut your cloud storage expenses by up to 70% without any downtime or performance disruptions. With Lucidity on your side, your cloud storage will scale in real-time and meet all the fluctuating demands of your workload as it enables seamless expansion and shrinkage without any performance lag, buffer, or downtime.

With Lucidity’s Storage Audit and Block Storage Auto-Scaler, you can rest assured that the following aspects of your multi-cloud cost management will be sorted, resulting in an efficient workflow.

• No Downtime: In the traditional method, enhancing the buffer by 65% would require manual intervention to shrink a 1 TB storage, which would take close to 6 hours. But Lucidity’s Block Storage Auto-Scaler enables automated disk expansion within 1 minute of the requirement being raised and seamless shrinkage without downtime.

Moreover, to ensure that your resources are provisioned per your requirements and there is no possibility of any downtime, we offer a “Policy” feature, wherein you can create a policy by setting desired utilization and buffer size. This will ensure that your instances are optimized according to the policy. The best part about this feature is that you can create innumerable policies, each tailored to address specific scenarios, with unique usage guidelines and buffering specifications. Each policy will be automatically applied to ensure seamless instance management.

• Seamless expansion and shrinkage: Our NoOps Block Storage Auto-Scaler continuously monitors the storage usage of EBS volume, and whenever required, it shrinks with no effort and expands within 1 minute of the request being initiated, resulting in 0 downtimes and no increase in latency.

• Upto 70% savings on storage cost: With Lucidity's Managed Disk Auto-Scaler, you can avoid incurring unnecessary costs for underutilized resources and save up to 70% on storage costs. By using our solution, you will be able to shrink and expand your disks seamlessly, adjusting to changing storage requirements effortlessly. When you have Lucidity at your disposal, you will no longer have to worry about fluctuating storage requirements as it delivers all of these benefits without compromising performance or causing disruptive downtime.

Worried about data security and integrity?

Just because our Storage Audit is free doesn't mean we overlook data security. We take data privacy and security very seriously and ensure the privacy and safety of our customer’s data never gets compromised. We offer the self-hosting ability, HTTPS connection, private connectivity, and data security to keep your data secure. 

Our Auto-Scaler does not require extensive security or network-level changes to be made in the customer’s environment. It only gathers storage metrics like throughput, IOPS, latency, disk size, and number of disks needed. The agents in our infrastructure do not interfere with the I/O path, and every action is logged for auditing purposes. Moreover, adhering to the data privacy and security guidelines, we at Lucidity do not gather or distribute any customer information.

What’s more?

• Round-the-clock support: We prioritize our customers’ grievances and are available 24/7 through email and chat. With us, you can rest assured that your queries will be resolved within 10 minutes.
• Streamlined database management: We eliminate the need to monitor disk space and IOPS for good manually. With Lucidity’s automated solution, you get observation, scheduling, and capacity monitoring, making database management a breeze. We provide comprehensive insight into different aspects affecting your disk utilization through a dashboard.

• Here, you can see your cost-saving aspects like average disk utilization (pre and post-Lucidity), disk coverage, how much you have saved with Lucidity, your ROI post-Lucidity, and total site reliability engineering (SRE) calls avoided after installing Lucidity. Everything you need to gain profound visibility on your disk and cost management will be available on this dashboard.

How do we work?

Auditing

We begin with an audit process, performing a detailed block storage analysis to identify the reason behind the inefficiency. We will give you the report in a week with little to no effort. The report will highlight the areas for resource optimization and cost savings.

Unlike the process of manual discovery or using monitoring tools, which requires significant time and effort from the DevOps team, our Storage Audit automates the entire process since it is a ready-to-use executable tool. It will provide insight into your disk health and its utilization, helping you optimize the spending and prevent downtime without any hassle.

Block Storage Auto-Scaler

Once you know the areas that require improvement, we will deploy our Block Storage Auto-Scaler, which hardly takes 15 minutes without making any changes within your infrastructure.

What happens once we deploy Lucidity?

The Lucidity Agent performs two tasks:

• Capture different storage metrics like IOPS, Queue, and Latency.
• Send these storage metrics to our managed disk auto-scaler.

Auto-scaler algorithms then send the command to the agent either for expansion or shrinkage.

What Makes Our Block Storage Auto-Scaler Stand Out?

Deploying the auto-scaler is straightforward, as it requires just three clicks. Once it's onboarded, it springs into action, optimizing storage utilization, bringing it quickly to a healthy 70-80%, which results in immediate cost savings. Moreover, with automated expansion capabilities, you are always ready to deal with unexpected traffic and workload surges within 1 minute. Conversely, the auto scaler will shrink the disk storage when the situation demands it.

Moreover, we emphasize the importance of minimizing any impact on your instance's vital resources, such as CPU and RAM, during the onboarding process as much as possible. Lucidity is meticulously configured to maintain resource efficiency, so it consumes only about 2% of your CPU and RAM. This ensures that your workload keeps running without impacting the instances.

ROI Calculator

Once you start using Lucidity, you can check with our ROI calculator how much you can save in your Azure, AWS, or GCP cloud cost management.

Tools That Will Help Optimize Compute Resources

Managing and optimizing compute resources across diverse multi cloud environments can be complex. You need comprehensive tools to solve these challenges and ensure optimal resource allocation. Below are some tools that will help you with compute resource optimization.

2. Densify

Densify offers multi-cloud cost optimization and operational service for Kubernetes and containerized workloads. It helps organizations with optimal resource allocation and resizing, ensuring cost efficiency. 

It also focuses on continuous analysis and resource optimization to cut unwanted expenses. It also provides insights into cluster costs by tags, namespace, and workload.

Customer Rating

• G2 - 4.8/5

3. Spot

A cloud automation platform, Spot employs advanced analytics to maintain continuous optimization of cloud resources. This multi cloud cost management software optimizes cloud operations by integrating machine learning and analytics, focusing on cost efficiency. 

This streamlined approach allows teams to deliver impactful applications without being overwhelmed by operational complexities and infrastructure management.

Customer Rating

• G2 - 4.4/5

4. Economize

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A multi cloud cost optimization tool, Economize, helps enterprises analyze, manage, and optimize their cloud cost. It supports AWS and Google Cloud.

This multi cloud cost optimization tool thoroughly analyzes your resource utilization and uncovers the underlying reasons for unexpected cost spikes, providing resource allocation and management recommendations. These recommendations notify you of potential cost savings or when your spend management isn’t in the required direction, allowing you to take action before things go out of control.

Customer Rating

• GetApp - 4.75/5

Tools For Visibility & Reporting

Multi-cloud ecosystems require the following tools that provide unparalleled visibility and analytics into cloud expenditures.

5. Datadog

Datadog is a multi-cloud cost management tool that offers various cloud cost control and optimization features. It supports Azure, GCP, AWS, and Alibaba Cloud. It even helps you clarify your cloud bill across AWS & Azure. How?

It provides out-of-the-box and user-defined tags to instantly allocate your cloud costs across cloud providers, by-products, services, and teams. Moreover, with its built-in cost validation features, you can make cost-effective decisions with the highest data accuracy.

Customer Rating

• G2 - 4.3/5

6. FinOut

FinOut stands out as an advanced multi-cloud optimization solution, empowering users with detailed insights into cost management per center. Its versatile features cater to various cloud platforms, including Azure, GCP, and AWS. 

By utilizing FinOut, businesses can understand their cloud expenses comprehensively, allowing for meticulous tracking and efficient management of costs within different operational centers. 

This tool enhances financial visibility and enables strategic decision-making, ensuring that resources are utilized optimally and budget allocations align seamlessly with business objectives.

Customer Rating

• G2 - 4.6/5

7. Coralogix

A full-stack observability platform, Coralogix uses proprietary Streama technology to help businesses gain complete control over their data and reduce cost spending. The platform provides real-time monitoring, tracking, and analysis capabilities, allowing businesses to resolve queries swiftly. 

Data is indexed and stored on highly available SSDs, ensuring quick access and efficient utilization of resources. Coralogix is an invaluable tool for businesses seeking seamless data management and cost-effective solutions.

Customer Rating

• G2 - 4.6/5

8. Cast AI

A Kubernetes management and cost optimization tool, Cast AI leverages AI-driven insights. It actively monitors and identifies opportunities for maximizing cost savings, offering a detailed analysis of spending patterns based on usage trends. What sets it apart is its seamless operation, requiring minimal manual intervention. 

With Cast AI, businesses can efficiently manage their cloud spending without the hassle of constant oversight, ensuring optimal cost efficiency and resource utilization. 

Customer Rating

•  G2 - 4.8/5

9. CloudZero

CloudZero is a multi-cloud cost intelligence platform that helps businesses make better spending and resource allocation decisions. CloudZero helps businesses achieve multi-cloud cost maturity regardless of the company's size. 

It uses tagged resources to generate timely reports that help provide stakeholders with visibility and budget alerts. The tool even provides a saving recommendations feature that helps improve your margin and boost productivity. 

It also has cost anomaly alerts that eliminate cost surprises and prevent overspending. 

Customer Rating

• G2 - 4.5/5

10. Cloudability 

Cloudability by Apptio is an IBM company, a multi-cloud management and organization platform. It assists IT, finance, and business teams in optimizing multi-cloud costs effectively. The platform offers a centralized dashboard that provides a unified view of expenses by collecting and visualizing data from multiple cloud providers. 

It accurately forecasts your multi-cloud expenses in real time using historical usage data and advanced forecasting algorithms.

Customer Rating

• G2 - 4.2/5

11. Flexera One

A SaaS-based multi-cloud cost management solution, Flexera One helps the organization navigate a complicated cloud environment. It offers comprehensive visualization and helps businesses make data-driven decisions. 

Besides, it provides accurate spending forecasts using machine learning algorithms. It also offers a wide range of recommendations, including resizing instances and, using reserved instances, and even switching to a more cost-effective service.

Customer Rating

• G2 - 3.7/5

12. CloudHealth

VMware Aria powered by CloudHealth offers holistic visibility into multi-cloud costs. It helps businesses optimize their infrastructure to avoid any wasteful spending while ensuring that the application's performance is not compromised. It supports AWS, GCP, and Azure. 

The dashboard provides intuitive data visualization through customizable cloud costs, resource utilization, and spending views. Analyzing your cloud usage patterns and spending habits generates customized recommendations to help you save money.

Customer Rating

• G2 - 4.1/5

13. CloudCheckr

CloudCheckr helps businesses with AWS and Azure optimize spend, eliminate waste, and enhance security and compliance throughout their cloud journey. An all-in-one dashboard that provides real-time insights into your cloud assets, such as virtual machines, databases, and storage. 

The tool can define a custom workflow based on specific cost thresholds or events. It optimizes your cloud infrastructure with smart algorithms to ensure you only pay for what you need by reallocating resources from overprovisioned to under-provisioned areas.

Customer Rating

• G2 - 4.1/5

14. Harness

Harness is a robust multi-cloud cost management tool offering comprehensive insights into your cost structures and spending habits. By gathering and analyzing detailed data, Harness provides invaluable information to optimize your expenses across various cloud platforms. 

Its robust capabilities empower businesses to make informed decisions and enhance their cloud operations cost-effectively.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.6/5 

15. Virtana

Virtana is widely recognized for its expertise in simplifying the optimization, migration, and monitoring processes for applications across diverse environments, including public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud setups. 

Their specialized solutions provide streamlined approaches to managing applications, ensuring efficiency and performance across various cloud environments.

Customer Rating

• G2 - 4.5/5

16. Granulate

Granulate is an advanced multi-cloud cost management software that employs cutting-edge AI technology to offer real-time optimization recommendations. With support for major cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, and Azure, Granulate provides businesses with invaluable insights. 

These insights empower organizations to make informed decisions, optimize their cloud resources, and maximize cost-efficiency. By leveraging Granulate's intelligent recommendations, businesses can significantly enhance their cloud operations and achieve optimal performance across various cloud environments.

Customer Rating

• G2 - 5/5

Ensure Efficient Multi-Cloud Cost Optimization

Using multiple clouds has become a common practice among many organizations in achieving an optimized infrastructure that helps to manage costs across all of them, reducing total cloud spend. 

Multi-cloud cost optimization tools are essential in this respect as they offer insight into the expenditure of various cloud service providers, allowing companies to monitor, analyze, and control their costs. 

Thus, such instruments allow companies to pinpoint areas where expenses can be cut down, rationalize resource allocation, and establish control on budgeting.

Ready to take your cloud cost management to the next level?

Reach out to Lucidity experts today!