Gartner® Research: Tame Data Egress Charges in the Public Cloud

Gartner says

“I&O leaders responsible for public cloud financial management (FinOps) often find large and unexpected charges on their bill when moving data from the cloud and between cloud services, zones and regions.”

This research from Gartner outlines essential insights and recommendations.

Key Findings:

• Cloud providers do not charge for data transfer into their environment. This causes infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders to overlook significant costs that occur after moving data within or between clouds.
• Data egress charges can be hard to spot because they are scattered throughout a cloud bill and attached to different types of cloud resources.
• Many cloud architectures that rely on data replication for resilience will naturally generate egress charges, forcing I&O leaders to balance the costs and benefits of high availability.

Recommendations:

• Pinpoint sources of high cloud network costs by analyzing the data transfer operations of their cloud systems. 
• Track and manage data egress costs by defining a proper landing zones partitioning; defining and deploying a tagging strategy; and leveraging on cloud financial management tools capable of providing the right level of detail to implement ongoing cost monitoring.
• Optimize cloud egress costs by proactively adopting cloud design patterns with lower egress charges. Tame the inevitable egress costs by applying some additional cost control techniques and treating cloud network optimization as a joint effort between I&O and application teams.