Businesses are increasingly adopting a multi-cloud approach, and for good reason. They can switch providers during downtime or outages, choose solutions tailored for specific workloads, teams, or departments, and leverage ideal pricing models for each resource. In short, a multi-cloud approach results in more flexibility and scalability while reducing vendor dependency.
However, the multi-cloud concept has its challenges: varying interfaces and tools (sometimes requiring vendor-specific expertise), pricing models, and billing metrics. Hidden costs, such as network egress and data transfer costs, can be difficult to track. These complexities increase costs, which can quickly escalate and cause you to miss out on potential savings. Left unchecked, these costs can lead to budget overruns.
That’s why cost optimization in a multi-cloud strategy is essential for maximizing ROI. It helps keep overspending or unnecessary spending to a minimum and enhances scalability.
Read on as we uncover the benefits of managing costs across multiple cloud providers and review five leading multi-cloud cost management platforms.
What Is a Multi-Cloud Cost Management Platform?
A Multi-Cloud Cost Management Platform is a tool that helps organizations monitor, analyze, and optimize cloud spending across multiple providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Unlike native cost tools that only provide visibility within a single cloud, these platforms centralize cost data, standardize reporting, and automate optimization to improve financial control.
These platforms address the complexities of managing costs in multi-cloud environments that can result in wastage, which is on the rise: Stacklet’s 2024 Cloud Cost & Usage Optimization Survey revealed for 51% of respondents, more than 40% of their cloud spend is waste.
By providing a unified view of cloud expenses, these platforms help businesses reduce waste, optimize workload placement, and enforce governance policies across all cloud environments.
Benefits of Using a Multi-Cloud Cost Management Tool
Good multi-cloud cost management software offers numerous advantages when it comes to keeping costs under control:
Centralized visibility for all cloud costs
Multi-cloud cost management tools integrate with the APIs and billing systems of various cloud service providers, centralizing cost and performance data across all platforms in an intuitive format.
This centralized visibility makes it easier to extract cost and performance data, such as billing details and usage metrics. It’s even possible to drill down into specifics, analyzing metrics such as costs by service (e.g., compute or storage), department, or project. With centralized visibility, users don’t have to log into multiple platforms to review spending — everything is in place. With the introduction of FinOps FOCUS last year, cloud providers are also working toward standardizing cost data formats, making it easier for organizations to consolidate and analyze multi-cloud expenses efficiently.
Automated resource management
A multi-cloud management tool focused on usage optimization helps optimize resource allocation by making automated recommendations based on workload demands. It dynamically scales resources up or down, preventing both over-provisioning and under-provisioning, ensuring cost efficiency without compromising performance.
For instance, if an application on Google Cloud experiences higher compute demand during peak hours, the platform can automatically deploy additional resources and scale them down when demand decreases through automated schedulers.
These tools also analyze cost and performance trends, identifying idle, underutilized, or orphaned resources (e.g., unused storage volumes or inactive VMs). To eliminate waste, they either decommission unnecessary resources or transition workloads to lower-cost alternatives, optimizing cloud spending without manual intervention.
Vendor-neutral insights
The centralized view that multi-cloud cost management tools provide makes it easier for organizations to compare services objectively and identify optimization opportunities. This fuels informed, data-driven decision-making tailored to your organization’s specific needs.
The system collects pricing data from various providers, analyzes resource usage, and based on these findings, recommends appropriately sized instances. This allows an organization to move to more cost-effective cloud management platforms when possible.
Streamlined reporting and compliance
Multi-cloud cost management solutions automate compliance monitoring and reporting, consolidating cost data from multiple cloud providers into a single interface that can be customized to meet regulatory and internal compliance requirements. This centralized approach simplifies audits by providing a single source of truth for tracking cloud expenses, ensuring transparency across financial and technical teams.
Many platforms also allow businesses to define and enforce compliance policies, such as spending limits, resource usage rules, and security controls. Continuous monitoring helps detect non-compliant behavior or cost anomalies in real time, enabling teams to take corrective action before issues escalate.
With the introduction of FinOps FOCUS, cloud providers are now working toward standardizing billing and usage data, making it easier for organizations to integrate and analyze multi-cloud costs consistently.
Cost efficiency through automation
Multi-cloud cost management software can automate key cost optimization processes, eliminating manual intervention and reducing inefficiencies. They dynamically adjust resource allocation, optimize pricing commitments, and detect cost anomalies in real time to ensure spending aligns with actual usage.
By leveraging AI-driven automation, these platforms identify and decommission idle resources, scale workloads efficiently, and shift to lower-cost alternatives where applicable. This continuous optimization ensures that businesses maximize savings without compromising performance, making cloud cost management more efficient and proactive.
Common Features To Look for in a Multi-Cloud Cost Management Platform
With the vast number of cloud management solutions boasting big promises, it’s important to know which features will align with your business’s cloud computing needs. Be on the lookout for:
Comprehensive cloud cost visibility
A comprehensive dashboard aggregates data from different cloud platforms, allowing the tracking of costs across all platforms. It details costs by project, department, or application, allowing you to attribute expenses more accurately while understanding where the bulk of your cloud resources are being consumed.
Comprehensive cloud cost visibility also helps businesses track costs in real time and avoid surprises with billing. Businesses can make cost-optimization decisions (like decommissioning or resizing idle or underutilized resources, or switching instances to cheaper providers) as a result of this holistic visibility.
Further, real-time monitoring detects unusual spending patterns as they occur, such as sudden usage spikes. This prompts businesses to investigate and mitigate potential issues right away.
When looking for multi-cloud cost management software, consider a tool that allows you to set up alerts when you approach or exceed set usage thresholds or budget limits.
Autonomous discount management
Multi-cloud cost management tools vary in their approach to commitment management, also known as rate optimization in FinOps. Rate optimization focuses on reducing the per-unit cost of running workloads by leveraging and managing discount instruments, pricing models, and cloud provider agreements.
Some semi-automated tools assist with commitment planning by recommending Reserved Instances (RIs), Savings Plans (SPs), and committed use discounts (CUDs) based on past usage patterns. These tools help track key metrics, monitor utilization trends, and provide manual recommendations, leaving organizations responsible for purchasing, renewing, and adjusting commitments as usage fluctuates.
On the other hand, fully autonomous platforms like ProsperOps eliminate manual effort by ingesting near real-time cloud usage data and dynamically optimizing a portfolio of commitments. These platforms continuously blend and rebalance RIs, SPs, and CUDs to maximize savings while maintaining flexibility. They also adjust to shifts in workload demands, ensuring businesses always have the right mix of long-term commitments and on-demand resources.
By automating commitment purchases, renewals, and modifications, autonomous discount management tools optimize cloud spend without requiring constant oversight.
Finance and accounting reporting
The true value of multi-cloud cost management software lies in a robust reporting and analytics feature. Robust reporting tools enable businesses to generate customized reports on metrics like service usage, cost trends, and anomalous spending patterns for actionable insights and better decision-making.
With these insights, businesses can maintain control over their multi-cloud budgets while driving efficiency and value. Detailed analytics further empower businesses to identify cost drivers, forecast expenses, and implement strategies to optimize spending.
Engineering optimization
Multi-cloud cost management tools that specialize in usage optimization go beyond financial tracking by incorporating engineering-focused features that streamline resource allocation, workload performance, and cost efficiency across cloud environments.
This optimization changes the way an organization views multi-cloud infrastructure management and prompts a move away from traditional approaches that fail to account for the nuanced complexities of multi-cloud management.
Engineering optimization ensures that multi-cloud deployments are properly configured to balance performance, scalability, and cost efficiency. Key features include:
- Right-sizing recommendations
- Autoscaling
- Workload placement optimization
- Idle resource detection
- Kubernetes cost optimization
- Data transfer optimization
Cost allocation
Features like tagging, showback, and chargeback ensure accurate cost tracking and allocation among teams or departments.
- Tagging enables granularity in cost tracking and assigns consistent metadata to resources across multiple cloud platforms. However, standardized tagging policies are necessary to prevent inconsistency, which can lead to gaps in tracking or duplicate costs.
- Showback allocates centralized costs back to teams, departments, or products based on their proportional consumption. Organizations can see where cloud costs were applied versus where they were purchased, which helps them better understand and manage costs.
- Chargeback allocates costs to each team, department, or product based on their share of usage in each platform. It ensures fair cost allocation, provides clear insights into cloud spending, and fosters a culture of responsible cloud consumption.
5 Multi-Cloud Cost Management Tools
There’s a wide range of tools and platforms available for businesses aiming to manage their multi-cloud environments effectively. Here are our top five picks:
1. ProsperOps
ProsperOps is an automated FinOps platform that offers cloud savings as a service, autonomously optimizing a portfolio of discount instruments to reduce AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud costs. It dynamically blends discount instruments like Reserved Instances, Savings Plans and CUDs by continuously analyzing cloud usage and optimizes commitment coverage to achieve an Effective Savings Rate (ESR) of 40% or more.
Unlike manual cost management efforts, which require ongoing monitoring and adjustments, ProsperOps offers a hands-free, risk-free approach to AWS cost optimization. It reduces financial lock-in risks, ensures discount instruments are always optimized, and eliminates operational friction — allowing businesses to save without changing their infrastructure or workflows.
Key features include:
- Autonomous discount management that continuously optimizes discount instruments in near real time
- Commitment management for all three clouds: AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure
- Frictionless setup with no manual interventions or infrastructure changes required
- Zero-risk pricing model, where you only pay a percentage of the savings generated
2. CloudZero
CloudZero is a cloud cost intelligence platform that offers comprehensive visibility into cloud expenditures across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, and more. It provides automated cost allocation, real-time monitoring, and AI-powered anomaly detection to help organizations understand and control their cloud spending.
To maximize cloud savings, you can integrate the granular visibility of CloudZero with ProsperOps’ automated rate optimization.
Key features include:
- Automatically analyzes resource usage patterns to accurately attribute costs to various teams, cloud products and services, and even unique customers
- Intelligent budget management features to help businesses track and control spending across different projects
- Uses AI-powered anomaly detection to flag unusual spending patterns
3. Ternary
Ternary is a multi-cloud FinOps platform that aggregates and normalizes cost data from various cloud environments, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. It offers features such as cost visualization, machine learning-powered anomaly detection, customizable alerting, and workload optimization recommendations. Ternary provides transparency and detailed spending breakdowns across teams, facilitating data-driven decisions to enhance cloud cost efficiency.
Key features include:
- Cost visualization and analysis to identify cost drivers and optimization opportunities
- Machine learning-powered anomaly detection
- Customizable alerting and case management
- Workload optimization with rightsizing recommendations
4. Densify
Densify is a cloud and Kubernetes optimization platform that leverages machine learning to analyze workload patterns, ensuring resources are utilized efficiently. It provides predictive analytics and precise recommendations for resource allocation, optimizing auto-scaling groups, container environments, and automated node group management. Densify supports various cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, helping businesses maintain performance while reducing costs.
Key features include:
- Automated node balance and saturation analytics to help prevent unsafe cloud configurations
- Ability to simulate various scaling scenarios to ensure they’re sustainable when applying them to active workloads
- Integrated governance tools to keep cloud environments compliant with industry regulations
5. CAST AI
CAST AI is a Kubernetes automation platform that claims to reduce costs by over 50% through continuous monitoring and optimizing clusters in real time. It supports AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, and combines cost monitoring, autoscaling, rightsizing, and automated security to ensure efficient container management.
Key features include:
- Cloud cost optimization through automated scaling and provisioning
- Real-time Kubernetes cost monitoring across clusters and workloads
- Automated container and application security remediation
- AI-enabled cost-performance balancing for large language models
- Dynamic automated scaling
Tips for Selecting the Right Multi-Cloud Cost Management Platform
To ensure you optimize your cloud spending, maintain visibility, and control costs across multiple providers, consider the following criteria when selecting multi-cloud cost management software:
- Features that meet stakeholder needs: These can include long-term forecasting, budget thresholds, KPI tracking, compliance reporting, commitment management, usage optimization, and testing environments. Select features that meet the needs of finance, development, compliance, and IT teams, plus any other relevant stakeholders within your organization.
- Manual work vs. automation: While there’s more room for customization and control with manual work, it’s time-consuming, prone to errors, and difficult to manage as you scale. In contrast, automation mechanizes repetitive tasks, offers real time insights, makes scaling effortless, and reduces the risk of errors. Automation also supports proactive cost management.
- Integration with your existing systems: Verify compatibility with existing systems so teams can access the data and insights they need in their workflows without having to switch tools. This also enables more comprehensive analysis, resulting in more accurate cost allocation.
- User-friendliness and design: A simple, user-friendly interface makes a platform easier to adopt. Ensure that all of your team members regardless of technical expertise, can navigate the tool, generate reports, and analyze data, which reduces the risk of misconfiguration or misinterpretation.
- Security and compliance features: Ensure your chosen tool provides visibility into vulnerabilities that threaten data security and maintains adherence to industry standards and security policies to avoid compliance penalties. Look for robust cloud security features like encryption, role-based access control, and built-in compliance tracking and reporting.
Optimize Costs Across Your Cloud Providers With ProsperOps
While multi-cloud architectures offer more potential for cost savings, managing costs across multiple cloud providers presents its own set of challenges. This is where a multi-cloud cost management platform becomes handy.
ProsperOps is the #1 multi-cloud cost management tool for automating cost optimization while maximizing savings and minimizing financial risk for AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. Our platform operates silently behind the scenes and can be up in running within just a few hours, helping you optimize your multi-cloud costs and realize results immediately.
Sign up for a free demo today and take control of your cloud costs with ProsperOps!
