Holding Down the Costs of the Cloud

Rich Sutton knew he was spending too much renting server space. He’s a vice president for engineering at Proofpoint, a $3 billion maker of cybersecurity software that boosted its revenue 41 percent last year, according to analyst estimates—nice, but well shy of its attendant rise in cloud computing costs. Proofpoint rents about 2,000 servers from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon.com’s cloud arm, and paid more than $10 million in 2016, double its 2015 outlay. “Amazon Web Services was the largest ungoverned item on the company’s budget,” Sutton says, meaning no one had to approve the cloud expenses.

So he’s signed up with Cloudyn, one of a growing number of software startups trying to help businesses control their cloud costs. For a monthly fee of 2 percent to 3 percent of a client’s AWS costs, Cloudyn’s software assesses how much server power the company needs and offers suggestions to reduce its bills. Sutton says he’s been able to keep spending unchanged for six months using Cloudyn, which has helped him compare costs and figure out just how many server-hours a given worker or project uses, making it easier to pick the right volume discount.