Are you paying too much for Cloud services?

"The whole premise of the Cloud should be to drive the IT director to think small, however people aren't doing that," says Sharon Wagner, president of Cloudyn, an Israeli company whose SaaS application helps businesses monitor their cloud usage and provides recommendations on how to right-size it. "Many clients are over provisioning, which leads directly to over paying."

For example, industry-leading Amazon Web Service's popular Elastic Cloud Compute has four versions of on-demand instances to choose from. They range in price from $0.15 per hour for a small instance that provides 1.7G of memory, a single EC2 compute unit, and 160G of instant storage, all the way up to the extra-large version, which is $1.20 per hour and provides 15G of memory, eight EC2 compute units and 1,600G of instant storage. There are midsize and large offerings falling in between. Beyond that, there are offerings for high-memory on demand and high-CPU offerings, each which have different sizes of compute power as so then. Or, clients can choose to purchase reserved instances, which are paid for on an annual basis instead of being metered on an hourly rate. In the meantime, AWS recently announced its 19th price decrease in the past six years, and Windows Azure and Google dropped their prices also.

How is an enterprise to know which resources to get?

So just how is an enterprise to know which resources to get? Each business's situation is different however Wagner says usually if a business's service is up and running in the cloud for more than 40% of a year, at that time a reserved instance is likely a more efficient option than on-demand. The key, he says, is to have clear visibility into an enterprise's compute power and cloud usage, which Cloudyn and other cloud services providers offer applications in. Cloudyn's SaaS application tracks an enterprise's computing usage and its cloud purchases. Other services providers in the area include Uptime Software, Newvem and Cloud Cruiser.

This article originally appeared at NetworkWorld.com. Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social media. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.