The constant balancing act that comes from managing public cloud costs is a regular source of stress for the lucky team or individual tasked with protecting the organization’s IT infrastructure investment. 

Satisfying customer demands for new features and functionality often requires moving fast without the luxury of long-term planning and forecasting. And while the public cloud is capable of handling such rapid scale, architectural decisions that are motivated by speed rather than cost efficiency can lead to serious budgetary headaches down the road.

This is why so many cloud engineers and architects spend an outsized percentage of their time trying to optimize workloads and architectures to bring costs under control after the fact (this challenge becomes even more complex for companies operating in a multicloud environment). 

At the same time, cost optimization isn’t just about reducing expenses, it’s about ensuring efficient resource usage without impeding innovation. Enterprises often struggle to optimize costs while maintaining development speed for a number of reasons:

• Balancing control and flexibility at scale: Restricting cloud usage too much can slow teams down, while too little oversight leads to overspending
• Lack of visibility: Costs are spread across multiple platforms, making it difficult to track inefficiencies
• Operational complexity: Different pricing structures across cloud providers requires a unified approach to cost management

Introducing Custom Insights: Expertise meets automation

DoiT Insights, part of the DoiT Cloud Intelligence™ platform, helps organizations tackle these challenges by providing automated, data-driven recommendations to:

• Improve cost efficiency
• Strengthen infrastructure security
• Adopt cloud best practices

By analyzing cloud usage across providers, Insights identifies optimization opportunities and offers actionable recommendations for your AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and/or Snowflake environments. Using our powerful Cloud Analytics engine, Insights is regularly analyzing your cloud billing data to uncover savings opportunities, and enriching it with DoiT's extensive cloud expertise to generate actionable recommendations. These savings can be in the form of architectural improvements, workload rightsizing, storage optimization, and more.

These automated, data-driven recommendations are fast, scalable, and consistent—identifying cost-saving opportunities and best practices across multicloud infrastructures.

But not every optimization challenge can be solved with automation alone. The ability to consult with a DoiT expert and leverage the expertise that can only come from a human is a big advantage whenever you encounter a challenge in your cloud management efforts. That’s why we’re introducing Custom Insights—expert-driven recommendations tailored to each customer’s unique cloud environment.

Created by DoiT experts, these Insights go beyond algorithms to provide context-aware, strategic recommendations that account for the nuances of your specific business and use case.

While automation ensures speed and consistency, human expertise brings creativity, adaptability, and deeper contextual understanding. Together, they form a more comprehensive and balanced approach to cloud optimization.

Streamlining cloud optimization across providers

Managing cloud costs and security across multiple platforms often means jumping between different consoles, making it harder to get a unified view of all your optimization opportunities. To simplify this, DoiT Insights now integrates recommendations from AWS Trusted Advisor, bringing security and cost optimization insights directly into the DoiT console.

This means you can now see all your actionable recommendations in one place—whether they’re DoiT-generated insights (both automated and expert-driven), or AWS Trusted Advisor recommendations for security and cost optimization.

By surfacing these insights within the DoiT console, users no longer need to switch between AWS and DoiT to track and act on cost-saving or security measures. Everything is available under the Governance tab in the DoiT Cloud Intelligence toolbar, providing a more streamlined and efficient way to manage cloud resources. Moreover, customers can immediately create a Jira ticket for their engineering team directly in the console, or raise a support ticket to engage a DoiT expert for help taking action.

Keeping pace with the speed of innovation

As any experienced cloud user knows, providers like AWS and Google Cloud are constantly upgrading their infrastructure and services, and staying on top of all these changes can be a full-time job unto itself.

This is another area where the human intelligence imbued in DoiT’s team of experts comes into play. It’s our job to alert out customers of any changes that could affect their monthly bill, which are regularly delivered through the Insights dashboard.

One recent example is the introduction of a new Google Cloud-specific Insight designed to alert customers about upcoming support charges. This new Insight detects Cloud SQL major versions that reach end-of-life (EOL) by their developer communities; if a customer’s instance is running an EOL major version, they will be charged for extended support starting on May 1, 2025.

In addition to this latest Insight, the DoiT team has also added the following ones for AWS over the past several months:

• Delete idle NAT gateways
• Migrate ElastiCache Redis OSS nodes to Valkey
• Delete idle Kinesis Data Streams
• Avoid unallocated Elastic IPs
• Upgrade RDS engine versions
• Delete idle Elastic Load Balancers

Savings recommendations now include Snowflake spend as well, as Insights will alert you for any opportunities to optimize Snowflake auto-suspend, helping you reduce unnecessary compute charges. Insights analyzes your Snowflake billing data to detect when warehouses are consuming compute credits while idle, then calculates the potential savings you could achieve by tweaking your auto-suspension settings with clear, actionable steps to adjust configurations and optimize costs.

Smarter Cloud Optimization, All in One Place

Cloud cost optimization is a continuous process, especially for businesses navigating multicloud environments. With the latest enhancements to DoiT Insights, we’re making it easier to identify, understand, and act on cost-saving opportunities without slowing down innovation.

Whether you're fine-tuning auto-suspend settings in Snowflake, addressing security risks in AWS, or uncovering customized cost optimization opportunities, DoiT Insights gives you a clear, actionable path to optimization.

To learn more about these features, check out our interactive tour, or reach out to your DoiT account team to learn more.