When it comes to cloud solutions and software licensing, everything that starts as a good idea can quickly spiral into complexity and high costs. What starts as a flexible, scalable solution often turns into unexpected cloud bills and wasted software licenses.
According to Gartner’s 2024 forecast, global spending on public cloud services is expected to rise by over 20% year-over-year, reaching $675 billion, with generative AI and application modernisation driving demand for infrastructure in all cloud segments (Gartner, 2024).
Major technology companies are also anticipating greater cloud usage, with plans to address the substantial energy demand that AI and cloud infrastructures require. For example, Google has started investing in small modular nuclear reactors to power future AI-driven cloud operations, underscoring the rapid expansion and energy needs expected for the cloud sector (The Guardian, 2024).
That’s where ServiceNow’s Cloud Cost Management come in—a powerful tool that helps organisations regain control of their cloud and software costs.
The challenges our customers face
Managing cloud spend poses distinct challenges:
- Rising cloud costs – Cloud platforms often lead to hidden expenses. Many companies end up paying for underutilised or idle resources, with as much as 30% of cloud spending potentially wasted.
- License mismanagement – As cloud spending rises, it often leads to additional license costs, further increasing financial inefficiencies. This compounded complexity makes it harder to control overall spending, leading to even greater operational expenses.
- Fragmented cost visibility – With various vendors, departments often face disconnected data and inconsistent cost tracking, making budgeting difficult.
How we solve it with ServiceNow CCM
ServiceNow Cloud Cost Management enables real-time cost comparisons across multiple cloud providers, offering tools to significantly reduce expenses through targeted actions. Here are some of the most impactful functions available:
Rightsizing resources
The Rightsizing feature analyses resource usage to recommend better sizes for resources that are wasting money by being over-provisioned or underused. A confidence rating and predicted savings support each recommendation. Schedule Rightsizing jobs to resize the resources you specify.
Reservation or Saving plans
The Reservation or Saving plans feature recommends resources that could decrease costs by the conversion of on-demand payment plans to reservation plans. These plans are also called committed-use discounts, committed-use savings plans, or reserved instance plans.
Unassigned resources
Unassigned resources policies help you to identify the resources that aren’t associated with a change group and to assign them appropriately. When a resource is assigned to the correct group, the resource can be appropriately governed even as it goes through stages such as patching, upgrading, and reconfiguring.
The Cloud Cost Management application from ServiceNow can generate compute and database recommendations for AWS, Azure, and GCP. The latest data is fetched every day at midnight.
Business hours
A Business hours job applies policies to identify resources that are running when they should be powered off, reports them, and can start and stop them on a schedule that you specify. Running only during specified business hours can significantly reduce your cloud spend.
Cloud budgets
To manage your cloud spend, you can define and monitor custom budget plans. The system compares the plans with billing data to calculate and report on how well budgets are being met. Understanding budget compliance by groups and service accounts can significantly improve oversight and reduce cloud spend.
Cloud Cost Management overview
The user-friendly Cloud Cost Management overview page enhances efficiency and insight. With it, you can:
- Track spending – See your last 30 days’ cloud spend with details on the total budget and potential savings.
- Analyse breakdown – View costs by provider, service category, cloud service, or account, with sorting options for past months and cost views.
- Forecast & trends – Group forecasts by provider or account and monitor top spending trends by service and provider.
- Savings insights – Check potential versus actual savings, with actionable alerts and recommendations for optimisation.
For more details follow official ServiceNow documentation.
Conclusion
As cloud services and software licensing continue to grow in both scale and complexity, businesses face increasing challenges in managing costs effectively. However, with the right tools — such as ServiceNow’s Cloud Cost Management organisations can regain control, optimise their cloud resources, and eliminate inefficiencies. By leveraging powerful features like Rightsizing, Reservation Plans, and Business Hours management, companies can significantly reduce their spending while maintaining compliance and maximising value.
The ongoing rise in cloud and software spending, driven by the increasing adoption of Generative AI and growing infrastructure demands, highlights the importance of proactive cost management. With the right strategy and tools in place, organisations can not only mitigate rising costs but also ensure long-term sustainability in their cloud and software investments.