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	<title>FinOps Archives - CDInsights</title>
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		<title>Solving the Challenges of Multi-cloud Cost Management</title>
		<link>https://www.clouddatainsights.com/solving-the-challenges-of-multi-cloud-cost-management/</link>
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		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michael Arkoosh]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Jul 2024 00:57:55 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Cloud Strategy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cloud costs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FinOps]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[multi-cloud]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.clouddatainsights.com/?p=5275</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[Organizations must implement centralizing cloud spend management. This is particularly important in modern enterprises where multi-cloud costs can easily get out of hand. ]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" width="1000" height="667" src="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Depositphotos_7123919_S.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-5277" srcset="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Depositphotos_7123919_S.jpg 1000w, https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Depositphotos_7123919_S-300x200.jpg 300w, https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Depositphotos_7123919_S-768x512.jpg 768w, https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Depositphotos_7123919_S-930x620.jpg 930w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption"><em>Organizations must implement centralizing cloud spend management. This is particularly important in modern enterprises where multi-cloud costs can easily get out of hand.</em></figcaption></figure></div>


<p>If you have a multi-cloud architecture – as <a href="https://www.oracle.com/lu/news/announcement/98-percent-enterprises-adopted-multicloud-strategy-2023-02-09/">98 percent</a> of enterprises that use the cloud do – one of the most important steps you can take to manage cloud costs effectively is tracking all of your cloud spending from a central vantage point.</p>



<p>Unfortunately, that&#8217;s often much easier said than done. The cloud providers don&#8217;t make it very simple even to pull billing data in a standardized way, let alone interpret it consistently side-by-side.</p>



<p>Nonetheless, finding a way to centralize cloud spend management is critical if you want to optimize your ability to understand what you&#8217;re spending and avoid wasting money in the cloud. And given the right strategies and tools, implementing centralized bill tracking is feasible enough.</p>



<p><strong>See also: </strong><a href="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/navigating-cloud-costs-and-egress-insights-on-enterprise-cloud-conversations/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Navigating Cloud Costs and Egress: Insights on Enterprise Cloud Conversations</a></p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><a></a>The importance of multi-cloud cost management</h3>



<p>There are two main reasons why tracking cloud spending from a centralized location is important.</p>



<p>One is that in some cases, businesses deploy workloads that span multiple clouds, and monitoring the costs associated with each cloud is the only way to determine the total cost of the workload. For instance, you might deploy an application in one cloud but have a &#8220;<a href="https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/disaster-recovery-dr-architecture-on-aws-part-iii-pilot-light-and-warm-standby/">warm standby</a>&#8221; environment for the same app provisioned in a different cloud for disaster recovery purposes. In that case, you&#8217;d need to know what each cloud provider is charging for the infrastructure the app consumes in order to track your total cost of running the app.</p>



<p>The other reason that makes centralized cloud spend tracking crucial is the fact that you can&#8217;t effectively monitor or optimize your total cloud spending unless you can view granular spending data from across all of your clouds side-by-side. Knowing that you reduced your spending last month in one cloud isn&#8217;t very helpful if you don&#8217;t know how your spending changed in a different cloud – or how fluctuations in cloud spend align with different types of cloud services across your various cloud environments.</p>



<p>If you like analogies, think of it this way: Centralized cloud spend monitoring is like tracking what you spend in total for groceries from multiple stores over the course of a month. Collecting and interpreting this data from a central location is the only way to determine whether your overall grocery spending is trending up or down. You&#8217;d be in a much weaker position to manage your grocery costs if you only monitored how much you spent at each individual store without having an easy way to track overall spending across all stores.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><a></a>The challenges of centralized cloud spend management</h3>



<p>But as I mentioned, centralized spend management in the cloud can be tough to implement.</p>



<p>The issue starts with the mere task of importing billing data from cloud providers. Although all major public clouds generate bills that detail what you spent each month, they expose the billing data in a different way. Amazon Web Services (AWS) generates a large CSV file, for example, while Google Cloud Platform (GCP) pushes its customers&#8217; billing data into BigQuery, a data analytics service hosted on its platform. For its part, Azure expects customers to import billing data using APIs. This means that simply getting all of your billing data into a central location requires implementing multiple data importation workflows.</p>



<p>Once the data is centralized, comparing it can be challenging because each cloud provider structures billing data a bit differently. For example, AWS records charges for cloud servers based on how many hours they were used, whereas Azure reports cloud server billing data based on daily usage – so you can&#8217;t compare your total cost for cloud servers per hour or per day without converting the data supplied by each provider.</p>



<p>Consider, too, that GCP breaks cloud server spending into separate costs for compute and memory. AWS and Azure don&#8217;t do this; they report billing information based only on the total resources consumed by a cloud server. Thus, if you use AWS or Azure, you need to disaggregate the data yourself if you want the level of granularity that GCP provides by default – and doing so is important if you need to make an apples-to-apples comparison of what you spend for both compute and memory across clouds.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><a></a>Making cloud billing more centralized and consistent across clouds</h3>



<p>Faced with these challenges, what can an organization do to manage cloud spending effectively across multiple cloud platforms?</p>



<p>One approach is to try to build your own cloud spend management system from scratch. If you have sufficient software development and data management resources within your organization, it&#8217;s not especially challenging to build a tool that pulls in billing data from each cloud provider, then transforms and aggregates it in ways that make it possible to draw at least basic comparisons of spending data across clouds. However, the big drawback of this approach is that whenever a cloud provider changes its billing structures even slightly or introduces new billing metrics – which happens frequently and often with no warning – you have to update your spend management tool.</p>



<p>Fortunately, this fraught, DIY approach to managing cloud spending is not the only option. Some third-party cloud cost management tools can automatically pull and transform billing data from all major cloud providers, making it easy to compare and optimize costs without having to build and maintain your own spend management tool.</p>



<p>Solutions like these are on track to grow even more robust in the near- to medium-term future thanks to initiatives like <a href="https://focus.finops.org/">FOCUS</a>, an effort by the FinOps Foundation to create an open standard for managing cloud billing data. FOCUS promises to make it easier for organizations to collect and interpret bills from multiple clouds in a consistent way.</p>



<p>And no matter which tools you implement for centralizing cloud spend management, making changes within your organization is important as well for achieving a consistent approach to tracking billing data. Businesses should educate FinOps stakeholders – including both engineers, who play a key role in ensuring that cloud resources are configured in ways that enable effective cost tracking, and finance teams, who take the lead in interpreting billing data – in the intricacies of multi-cloud spend tracking. They should also ensure that various teams adopt a shared strategy for monitoring cloud spending. And they should engage with outside groups, like the FinOps organization, to keep abreast of advancements designed to make it easier to track spending across clouds.</p>
<div class="saboxplugin-wrap" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person" itemscope itemprop="author"><div class="saboxplugin-tab"><div class="saboxplugin-gravatar"><img alt='Michael Arkoosh' src='https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/5c787e32774589b05d11240b0822e9a3?s=100&#038;d=mm&#038;r=g' srcset='https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/5c787e32774589b05d11240b0822e9a3?s=200&#038;d=mm&#038;r=g 2x' class='avatar avatar-100 photo' height='100' width='100' itemprop="image"/></div><div class="saboxplugin-authorname"><a href="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/author/michael-arkoosh/" class="vcard author" rel="author"><span class="fn">Michael Arkoosh</span></a></div><div class="saboxplugin-desc"><div itemprop="description"><p>Michael Arkoosh is the Director of Technical Optimization at <a href="http://www.vegacloud.io/"><strong><em>Vega Cloud</em></strong></a><strong><em>.</em></strong></p>
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		<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">5275</post-id>	</item>
		<item>
		<title>Cloud Control: Four Tips for Effective FinOps</title>
		<link>https://www.clouddatainsights.com/cloud-control-four-tips-for-effective-finops/</link>
					<comments>https://www.clouddatainsights.com/cloud-control-four-tips-for-effective-finops/#respond</comments>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Sam Clark]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Sun, 16 Jun 2024 02:01:10 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Cloud Strategy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cloud costs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FinOps]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.clouddatainsights.com/?p=5235</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[Discover how to leverage FinOps for cloud control effectively to avoid unpleasant surprises in cloud costs.]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img decoding="async" width="999" height="669" src="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Depositphotos_50135229_S-1.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-5255" style="aspect-ratio:1;width:819px;height:auto" srcset="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Depositphotos_50135229_S-1.jpg 999w, https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Depositphotos_50135229_S-1-300x201.jpg 300w, https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Depositphotos_50135229_S-1-768x514.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 999px) 100vw, 999px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption"><em>Discover how to leverage FinOps for cloud control effectively to avoid unpleasant surprises in cloud costs.</em></figcaption></figure></div>


<p>The cloud has revolutionized business operations. For enterprises, there&#8217;s immense value in the ability to get data to and from the right places and enable anytime/anywhere collaboration. Paired with the cost-efficiency gains offered by a lower IT burden and instant access to the latest technology, the cloud carries a very compelling package for agile organizations. </p>



<p>However, in order to capture those advantages, businesses need to plan for the obstacles that cloud migration inevitably brings. Resource control challenges and complex management structures can lead to companies paying for cloud services and old test deployments that are no longer in use. With the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI), a universe of automated tools and services are being employed that can lead to surprise bills.</p>



<p>See also: <a href="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/addressing-finops-and-security-issues-with-automated-cloud-operations/">Addressing FinOps and Security Issues with Automated Cloud Operations</a></p>



<p>These challenges are why FinOps was created. This management approach focuses on shared responsibility and accountability for cloud infrastructure and costs. With an emphasis on cross-departmental collaboration – including business executives and leaders of finance, technology and engineering – a clearer picture comes into focus. Through FinOps practices, companies can reduce complexity, get the most from resources and better optimize cloud cost and performance.&nbsp;</p>



<p>If you’re looking to start or enhance your FinOps program, first, you’ll need to be sure department leaders are on the same page. Then build a cost-aware environment, leveraging technology and partners while identifying detrimental user behaviors and more. The following four tips can help you make strong headway.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Find the common ground</h3>



<p>A chasm often exists between those who oversee budgets and those who generate expenses. This is best seen in organizations where any employee armed with a company credit card can add resources and raise overhead without supervision. If you’ve got tens or hundreds of employees doing this the costs can add up quickly. There are reporting tools that provide limited visibility, but they don’t let leaders fully identify and solve problems. Using the same data and a shared language gets leaders on common ground and working more collaboratively.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Identify problems and advance accountability&nbsp;</h3>



<p>While reporting tools can offer a money trail, they won’t address bad habits among those credit-card-bearing employees. Savvy enterprises pair reporting tools that identify haphazard spenders with set objectives and goals to shape better behavior. This can lead to a more cost-aware culture in which employees better understand, optimize and control expenses with data that supports decision-making. In this scenario, everyone is financially accountable and has ownership. The earlier this is done, the better: Adding controls to an environment that’s already scaled isn’t easy.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Look outside for expertise</h3>



<p>Gaining control requires intelligent technology and expertise in analytics, optimization and oversight of cloud architecture. One of the best external investments an enterprise can make is to enlist consultants with proven experience and relevant certifications. Further, working with a knowledgeable FinOps partner can complement or extend your capabilities and resources for cloud control.&nbsp;</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Speed your cycles</h3>



<p>Companies leading the FinOps charge are doing what’s known in software development as shifting left. This refers to conducting evaluation quality and testing earlier in the development life cycle, even prior to code being written. When you apply this approach to FinOps, you bring cost ownership and responsibility to the cycle earlier. The earlier you correct behaviors, the less time they have to take systemic root.&nbsp;</p>



<p>See also: <a href="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/how-company-size-and-maturity-impact-finops-success/">How Company Size and Maturity Impact FinOps Success</a></p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">The benefits of cloud control</h3>



<p>Your monthly bill only shows a limited view of how your cloud expenses are falling . It’s easy for the consumption of resources and expenses to grow without the right oversight. What’s more, not only is the cloud constantly evolving, so are features and services offered by cloud service providers (CSPs). Unless you’ve got a staff committed to controlling usage and knowledgeable of every industry development, you’ll never be able to stay current. And if you don’t keep up, competitors will pass you by.</p>



<p>Just remember that FinOps is not a one-and-done campaign when it comes to cloud control. Enterprises need to align spending to business goals. Since those also change from time to time, and the cloud and related technology are so dynamic, FinOps must be a standard, ongoing approach. However, it’s worth it.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Global Market Estimates expects the cloud FinOps market to grow from $832.2 million in 2023 to over <a href="https://www.globalmarketestimates.com/market-report/cloud-finops-market-4026#:~:text=recent%20market%20numbers-,Global%20Cloud%20FinOps%20Market%20Size,18.8%25%20from%202023%20to%202028.">$2.75 billion</a> by 2028. That’s an eye-opening Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 18.8%. And with the FinOps Foundation community climbing from zero to 16,000 in just five years – and 48 of the Fortune 50 in its ranks – it’s clear greater cloud control, cost-efficiency and performance are more than possible.&nbsp;</p>



<p>With FinOps, it’s the future.</p>
<div class="saboxplugin-wrap" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person" itemscope itemprop="author"><div class="saboxplugin-tab"><div class="saboxplugin-gravatar"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/SamClark-1.png" width="100"  height="100" alt="" itemprop="image"></div><div class="saboxplugin-authorname"><a href="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/author/sam-clark/" class="vcard author" rel="author"><span class="fn">Sam Clark</span></a></div><div class="saboxplugin-desc"><div itemprop="description"><p>Sam Clark is a senior technical account manager at <strong><a href="https://www.doit.com/">DoiT International</a></strong>. He possesses more than 25 years of experience in the technology sector, with a dedicated focus on cloud expertise spanning the last decade. Specializing in optimizing cloud operations and cost efficiency, he champions the principles of FinOps via webinars, podcasts and blog posts.</p>
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		<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">5235</post-id>	</item>
		<item>
		<title>How Company Size and Maturity Impact FinOps Success</title>
		<link>https://www.clouddatainsights.com/how-company-size-and-maturity-impact-finops-success/</link>
					<comments>https://www.clouddatainsights.com/how-company-size-and-maturity-impact-finops-success/#respond</comments>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jenna Wright]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Sun, 09 Jun 2024 14:27:11 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Cloud Strategy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cloud cost]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FinOps]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.clouddatainsights.com/?p=5231</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[FinOps is essential to all companies. But company size has a lot to do with hampering its successful adoption. Smaller companies that are in high-growth mode don't always prioritize cloud cost optimization. And the bureaucracy at large organizations can impede efficient rightsizing.]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="999" height="669" src="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/FinOps-Depositphotos_27827083_S.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-5233" srcset="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/FinOps-Depositphotos_27827083_S.jpg 999w, https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/FinOps-Depositphotos_27827083_S-300x201.jpg 300w, https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/FinOps-Depositphotos_27827083_S-768x514.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 999px) 100vw, 999px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption"><em>FinOps is essential to all companies. But company size has a lot to do with hampering its successful adoption. Smaller companies that are in high-growth mode don&#8217;t always prioritize cloud cost optimization. And the bureaucracy at large organizations can impede efficient rightsizing.</em></figcaption></figure></div>


<p>Saving money on cloud computing is important for businesses of all types and sizes. However, as I&#8217;ve learned in my work helping guide organizations on cloud cost optimization journeys, a company&#8217;s capabilities in the realm of cloud cost management can vary significantly depending on factors like how large and mature the business is and how quickly it&#8217;s growing. FinOps can help.</p>



<p>Here&#8217;s why this oft-overlooked aspect of FinOps (meaning the practice of optimizing cloud spending) is critical for developing an effective cloud savings strategy, and what businesses of different types and sizes should do to align their FinOps initiatives with the nature of their organizations.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">The basics of cloud cost optimization</h3>



<p>FinOps is a framework for cloud cost optimization based on practices like the following:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Eliminating cloud waste by, for instance, shutting down cloud servers or databases that are no longer in active use.</li>



<li>Rightsizing cloud resources. This means making sure cloud resource configurations are in alignment with actual requirements so that you&#8217;re not paying for resources you don&#8217;t use.</li>



<li>Using scheduling to automate actions like turning off servers when they&#8217;re not needed.</li>



<li>Taking advantage of pricing discounts, such as &#8220;reserved&#8221; cloud server instances.</li>
</ul>



<p><strong>See also: </strong><a href="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/finops-becomes-more-important-as-cloud-spending-grows/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">FinOps Becomes More Important as Cloud Spending Grows</a></p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><a></a>How company characteristics impact FinOps</h3>



<p>Any company can pursue the FinOps practices I&#8217;ve just described. But some practices may prove easier to implement than others depending on how large and mature your company is, its organizational structure and its rate of growth.</p>



<p>For example, smaller companies tend to find it easier to make changes, like shutting down idle cloud servers. The reason why is that smaller organizations typically have less complex bureaucratic processes in place, which means there is not a long string of approvals to work through in order for an employee to secure the permission to turn a cloud server off.</p>



<p>In addition, when you are part of a small company that has just one engineering team, it&#8217;s often easier to figure out who created and maintains cloud resources, which is important for determining whether there&#8217;s a need for the resource to be running. This is much harder when you are working at a company with hundreds of engineers spread across dozens of teams, and you have no idea who &#8220;owns&#8221; a given cloud resource.</p>



<p>That said, smaller companies that are in high-growth mode don&#8217;t always prioritize cloud cost optimization. If you&#8217;re a startup – especially one backed by venture capital funding – you are probably more focused on bringing products to market and growing your revenue than on achieving the best cloud performance at the lowest possible cost. And that&#8217;s OK, as long as you have a plan in place for managing cloud spending as you grow.</p>



<p>As for larger companies, they often benefit from having larger staffs, which means they can spend more time on tasks like assessing cloud server configurations and rightsizing servers that are overprovisioned. This is harder to do at smaller organizations where IT teams are already overstretched. On the other hand, the bureaucracy at large organizations can impede efficient rightsizing, as I mentioned.</p>



<p>What about medium-sized organizations? In my experience, they fall into one of two camps. Some are in a &#8220;best of both worlds&#8221; position where they benefit from streamlined organizational structures that make it easy to apply changes, and they also have large enough staff to pursue cloud cost optimization. Others are the opposite – big enough to struggle to operate efficiently, but not so large that they have adequate staffing for cloud cost optimization.</p>



<p>At the same time, medium-sized companies tend to face extra pressure to keep cloud spending in check because they are no longer growing so rapidly that cost optimization can take a back seat. This makes it particularly important, in a sense, to establish healthy FinOps practices by the time a business has matured beyond the startup stage. If you don&#8217;t get on board with FinOps at that point, you&#8217;ll find it much harder to rein in cloud spending as your business – and, by extension, its cloud footprint – grows even larger and more complex.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><a></a>Aligning FinOps with your organization</h3>



<p>Because of challenges like these, organizations should factor their overall maturity into their FinOps adoption strategy.</p>



<p>For example, if you&#8217;re a small company without a lot of bureaucracy in place, now is the time to begin implementing practices like cloud resource tagging. Businesses can use tagging to identify applications, owners and environments, avoiding the headache of having to track down this information at a later time. It&#8217;s easier to make practices like tagging a routine part of your company&#8217;s operations when you&#8217;re small than it is if you wait until you&#8217;re much larger and already have entrenched practices.</p>



<p>At the same time, if your staff are spread too thinly to rightsize cloud servers, don&#8217;t make that a priority for the time being. Focus on lower-effort practices, like shutting down idle cloud resources. It&#8217;s better to take FinOps steps you can actually complete than to chase practices that aren&#8217;t realistic for your company given its current nature.</p>



<p>After all, we often talk about how FinOps is a &#8220;<a href="https://www.finops.org/framework/maturity-model/">crawl, walk, run</a>&#8221; endeavor – meaning you have to start small and then scale up your cloud cost management processes. But not all organizations crawl, walk and run in the same ways. Organizational size and maturity plays a critical role in where you start on your FinOps journey.</p>
<div class="saboxplugin-wrap" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person" itemscope itemprop="author"><div class="saboxplugin-tab"><div class="saboxplugin-gravatar"><img alt='Jenna Wright' src='https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/3379a9037ef2245d52743e08bfed1731?s=100&#038;d=mm&#038;r=g' srcset='https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/3379a9037ef2245d52743e08bfed1731?s=200&#038;d=mm&#038;r=g 2x' class='avatar avatar-100 photo' height='100' width='100' itemprop="image"/></div><div class="saboxplugin-authorname"><a href="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/author/jenna-wright/" class="vcard author" rel="author"><span class="fn">Jenna Wright</span></a></div><div class="saboxplugin-desc"><div itemprop="description"><p><strong><em>Jenna Wright is senior manager of FinOps at </em></strong><a href="http://www.vegacloud.io/"><strong><em>Vega Cloud</em></strong></a><strong><em>.</em></strong></p>
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		<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">5231</post-id>	</item>
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		<title>6 Key Changes Every Business Must Make to Succeed at FinOps</title>
		<link>https://www.clouddatainsights.com/6-key-changes-every-business-must-make-to-succeed-at-finops/</link>
					<comments>https://www.clouddatainsights.com/6-key-changes-every-business-must-make-to-succeed-at-finops/#respond</comments>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jenna Wright]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Fri, 19 Jan 2024 15:55:31 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Cloud Strategy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cloud cost optimization]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cloud infrastructure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FinOps]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.clouddatainsights.com/?p=4882</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[To succeed at FinOps, companies must recognize key changes and adjust strategies at each maturity stage. Discover how this happens here.]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[
<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1000" height="500" src="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Depositphotos_339208486_S.jpg" alt="key changes to succeed at FinOps" class="wp-image-4884" srcset="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Depositphotos_339208486_S.jpg 1000w, https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Depositphotos_339208486_S-300x150.jpg 300w, https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Depositphotos_339208486_S-768x384.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" /></figure>



<p>To succeed at FinOps, companies need to recognize key changes and adjust strategies as they move through different maturity stages. Let&#8217;s explore how this happens.</p>



<p>Reducing spending in the cloud via FinOps is a little like running a marathon. Runners encounter a range of different obstacles over the course of a long race. They start out by conquering what is arguably the greatest challenge of all – taking the first steps. From there, they need to prepare to climb hills, manage thirst, power through unexpected pain and so on. At all stages of the run, adaptability is key to reaching the finish line successfully.</p>



<p>See also: <a href="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/addressing-finops-and-security-issues-with-automated-cloud-operations/">Addressing FinOps and Security Issues with Automated Cloud Operations</a></p>



<p>Cloud cost optimization is similar in that the typical FinOps journey involves many distinct stages, some of which are harder than others. To succeed, businesses need to adjust their behavior and strategy on an ongoing basis.</p>



<p>How can an organization actually do that? How can companies adapt to the continuously fluctuating demands of FinOps? This article answers those questions by walking through some of the key changes and inflection points that businesses typically encounter over the course of their FinOps journeys and explaining how to succeed at each stage.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Change 1: Evolve your spending mentality</h3>



<p>The first key change that businesses need to make to succeed at <a href="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/finops-becomes-more-important-as-cloud-spending-grows/">cloud cost optimization</a> is simple: They must abandon a traditional data center mentality and replace it with one attuned to the unique nature of the cloud.</p>



<p>In other words, organizations must stop thinking of IT infrastructure as something that is fixed and rigid, as it is in conventional data centers. Instead, they should view infrastructure as a resource that is almost endlessly flexible and adaptable to changing needs. When you adopt this mindset, you are in a position to prioritize cost optimization whenever you make decisions related to cloud infrastructure.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Change 2: Modify your communication loop&nbsp;</h3>



<p>FinOps success also hinges on adapting your organization&#8217;s communication strategy such that technical stakeholders – like the engineers responsible for setting up and configuring cloud resources – are in conversation with financial stakeholders, who understand what the business can afford to spend in the cloud and can track spending over time.</p>



<p>This adaptation, which goes hand-in-hand with the mentality change I described above, is critical because traditionally, technical people and finance people operated in siloes. But to thrive at FinOps, both teams must understand each other. Engineers need to understand the cost implications of the decisions they make, and finance teams must appreciate the technical needs of the organization so they can help engineers meet those needs in a cost-effective way.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Change 3: Make simple cloud spending changes</h3>



<p>Once you have the right mentality and communication loops in place, you&#8217;re ready to begin making actual changes to reduce cloud spending.</p>



<p>The easiest way to get started here is to target changes – such as switching to Reserved Instances for cloud-based instances – that require relatively low effort, yet yield noticeable savings.</p>



<p>By starting small, you get quick wins that you can use to establish a positive feedback loop. Small changes prove that cutting cloud spending without compromising on performance priorities is possible, helping to achieve buy-in from stakeholders for further investment in FinOps.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Change 4: Hunt down and eliminate cloud waste</h3>



<p>After winning small victories, businesses should adapt their FinOps strategies so that they can identify and remediate unnecessary cloud infrastructure, such as unattached EBS volumes or virtual machines that don&#8217;t need to be running.</p>



<p>This is a type of change that requires more effort than moves like switching to Reserved Instances because finding waste requires a comprehensive analysis of your cloud environment and technical needs. But when done properly, the elimination of unnecessary infrastructure helps to increase overall cloud savings. It also offers the benefit of simplifying cloud environments (because when you shut down extraneous resources, you have fewer objects to monitor and evaluate), which makes it easier to implement further FinOps changes down the line.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Change 5: Adjust your cloud architecture</h3>



<p>When you&#8217;ve made the changes described above, you&#8217;ve reached a relatively mature stage on your FinOps journey. But there&#8217;s still room for more improvement in the form of changes to your cloud architecture strategy.</p>



<p>Here, I am referring to updates such as migrating to a newer generation of instance types, which can save money while maintaining or even boosting workload performance. Going further, you can even consider modifications like migrating workloads from virtual machines to containers – an initiative that requires significant effort (because it typically involves rewriting parts of the applications and learning new management tooling) but that leads to true cost optimization for some workloads.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Change 5: Make FinOps a continuous process</h3>



<p>The final stage in your <a href="https://www.rtinsights.com/emerging-trends-on-the-cloud-frontier/">FinOps journey</a> is to make FinOps a continuous and routine part of your operations. Rather than treating cloud cost optimization as a one-off process that you perform on a periodic basis, you should bake tasks like reviewing cloud spending metrics and identifying anomalies into an everyday activity.</p>



<p>When you do this, you achieve the greatest possible level of FinOps maturity. You also position your organization to react to new cloud savings opportunities as they emerge – which they will because workloads are always changing, and cloud providers are always rolling out new service offerings and configuration options. The only way to take advantage of new opportunities right away is to search for them constantly.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Conclusion: FinOps means continuous change</h3>



<p>Ultimately, being good at FinOps requires, in part, being good at change. And while the typical organization finds change at least somewhat challenging, the nice thing about FinOps is that once you begin making even just small changes, you begin seeing results in the form of reduced cloud spending. That makes it easier to embrace bigger changes, which lead to more savings and set the stage for even greater changes as you continue your FinOps journey.</p>
<div class="saboxplugin-wrap" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person" itemscope itemprop="author"><div class="saboxplugin-tab"><div class="saboxplugin-gravatar"><img alt='Jenna Wright' src='https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/3379a9037ef2245d52743e08bfed1731?s=100&#038;d=mm&#038;r=g' srcset='https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/3379a9037ef2245d52743e08bfed1731?s=200&#038;d=mm&#038;r=g 2x' class='avatar avatar-100 photo' height='100' width='100' itemprop="image"/></div><div class="saboxplugin-authorname"><a href="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/author/jenna-wright/" class="vcard author" rel="author"><span class="fn">Jenna Wright</span></a></div><div class="saboxplugin-desc"><div itemprop="description"><p><strong><em>Jenna Wright is senior manager of FinOps at </em></strong><a href="http://www.vegacloud.io/"><strong><em>Vega Cloud</em></strong></a><strong><em>.</em></strong></p>
</div></div><div class="clearfix"></div></div></div>]]></content:encoded>
					
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		<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">4882</post-id>	</item>
		<item>
		<title>Navigating the Cloud in 2024: AI Disruptions, Emerging Players, and Standardization Challenges</title>
		<link>https://www.clouddatainsights.com/navigating-the-cloud-in-2024-ai-disruptions-emerging-players-and-standardization-challenges/</link>
					<comments>https://www.clouddatainsights.com/navigating-the-cloud-in-2024-ai-disruptions-emerging-players-and-standardization-challenges/#respond</comments>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Elizabeth Wallace]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Sun, 31 Dec 2023 22:25:51 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Cloud Strategy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FinOps]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sovereign cloud]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.clouddatainsights.com/?p=4874</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[For cloud leaders, 2024 presents a paradox of increased complexity and new possibilities. Addressing these issues will contribute to a more resilient and well-rounded approach to cloud computing.]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1000" height="600" src="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/2024-Depositphotos_678298628_S.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-4876" srcset="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/2024-Depositphotos_678298628_S.jpg 1000w, https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/2024-Depositphotos_678298628_S-300x180.jpg 300w, https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/2024-Depositphotos_678298628_S-768x461.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption"><em>For cloud leaders, 2024 presents a paradox of increased complexity and new possibilities. Addressing these issues will contribute to a more resilient and well-rounded approach to cloud computing.</em></figcaption></figure></div>


<p>As the cloud computing landscape evolves, 2024 is poised to bring challenges and opportunities for both cloud providers and their customers, driven by the transformative forces of artificial intelligence (AI). While cloud giants wield immense power, disruptive factors such as AI adoption, chip supply shortages, and the demand for financial operations (FinOps) are reshaping the industry. What can we expect in the year to come? This overview delves into <a href="https://www.forrester.com/blogs/predictions-2024-cloud/">Forrester&#8217;s 2024 predictions</a>, shedding light on the transformative forces that will define the coming year.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><a></a>The AI Impact on Cloud Providers</h3>



<p>AI&#8217;s influence on the cloud market is unmistakable, with hyperscale cloud providers boasting the capacity to host graphics processing units (GPUs) crucial for AI workloads. However, the vulnerability lies in potential chip supply shortages. The three major cloud providers are not immune to this, opening the door for emerging players with GPUs and resurgent tech companies to cater to the growing demand for AI capabilities.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><a></a>Oracle&#8217;s Rise in the Cloud Arena</h3>



<p>Traditionally known for its database solutions, Oracle is quietly positioning itself to disrupt the cloud space. With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the company aims to become a general-purpose cloud provider capable of luring major accounts away from larger rivals. The surge in generative AI and large language models aligns perfectly with OCI&#8217;s capabilities, potentially leading to over ten major accounts redirecting substantial spending, totaling at least $100 million in annual cloud expenditure.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><a></a>Sovereignty Concerns Driving Hyperscaler Expansion</h3>



<p>In response to rising concerns about data sovereignty, climate change challenges, and geopolitical risks, hyperscale cloud providers are expected to announce 30 new regions in 2024. European customers, in particular, seek cloud providers offering both data sovereignty and resilience in the face of incidents like fires, outages, and ransomware attacks. The expansion into geographically separated regions aims to address these concerns and stay ahead of evolving regulatory requirements.</p>



<p><strong>See also: </strong><a href="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/big-three-launch-sovereign-cloud-efforts/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Big Three Launch Sovereign Cloud Efforts</a></p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><a></a>FinOps Standardization with FOCUS</h3>



<p>Financial operations (FinOps) are becoming a focal point for cloud customers, leading to the rise of the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS). Developed by the FinOps Foundation, FOCUS aims to simplify cloud billing and provide a vendor-neutral, multi cloud view of resources. FOCUS is gaining momentum, supported by major players like Microsoft and Google and with AWS expected to join soon. This standardization will empower non-IT stakeholders, including the CFO&#8217;s office and vendor management, to better engage with cloud operations teams.</p>



<p><strong>See also: </strong><a href="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/is-hybrid-cloud-the-way-to-deal-with-public-cloud-costs/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Is Hybrid Cloud the Way to Deal with Public Cloud Costs?</a></p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><a></a>Complexity and possibilities in 2024</h3>



<p>For cloud leaders, 2024 presents a paradox of increased complexity and new possibilities. Decisions on adopting new clouds for AI model training will add to the challenges they face. Simultaneously, the adoption of FinOps practices promises more efficient management of cloud workloads. Navigating this intricate landscape requires strategic planning and a keen understanding of emerging trends.</p>



<p>There&#8217;s still a laundry list of considerations for companies as they move cloud operations into the new year&#8211;prioritize data security and compliance, evaluate edge computing integration for low-latency processing, mitigate vendor lock-in risks through interoperability strategies, and invest in talent development for navigating evolving technologies.</p>



<h4 class="wp-block-heading"><a></a>Addressing upcoming changes</h4>



<p>It&#8217;s a significant investment in time and resources. However, addressing these considerations will contribute to a more resilient and well-rounded approach to cloud computing, aligning with broader business objectives and preparing for a dynamic and evolving technological landscape. Leveraging the insights provided, here are key actionable steps and considerations to inform decision-making and operational planning:</p>



<p>1. Evaluate AI Integration Strategies:</p>



<ul class="nv-cv-m wp-block-list">
<li><em>Action:</em> Assess your organization&#8217;s AI needs and readiness.</li>



<li><em>Consideration:</em> Explore the potential impact of AI disruptions on your current infrastructure and make necessary adjustments to meet evolving demands.</li>
</ul>



<p>2. Assess Cloud Provider Landscape:</p>



<ul class="nv-cv-m wp-block-list">
<li><em>Action:</em> Reevaluate your cloud provider choices and potential shifts.</li>



<li><em>Consideration:</em> Understand the implications of Oracle&#8217;s emergence as a disruptive player and assess whether Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) aligns with your organization&#8217;s requirements for AI capabilities and overall cloud services.</li>
</ul>



<p>3. Address Sovereignty and Resilience:</p>



<ul class="nv-cv-d nv-cv-m wp-block-list">
<li><em>Action:</em> Evaluate your current cloud providers&#8217; resilience and data sovereignty features.</li>



<li><em>Consideration:</em> Look closely at any announced expansion of regions by hyperscale providers and assess how it aligns with your organization&#8217;s risk mitigation and regulatory compliance strategies.</li>
</ul>



<p>4. Embrace FinOps Practices:</p>



<ul class="nv-cv-d nv-cv-m wp-block-list">
<li><em>Action:</em> Explore FinOps adoption within your organization.</li>



<li><em>Consideration:</em> Investigate how FinOps, particularly the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) standard, can enhance transparency in cloud billing, streamline financial operations, and foster collaboration between IT and non-IT stakeholders.</li>
</ul>



<p>5. Strategic Cloud Workload Planning:</p>



<ul class="nv-cv-d nv-cv-m wp-block-list">
<li><em>Action:</em> Develop a strategic plan for cloud workload management.</li>



<li><em>Consideration:</em> Acknowledge the increased complexity in cloud decision-making, especially regarding AI model training. Consider adopting FinOps practices to optimize cloud expenditures and improve operational efficiency.</li>
</ul>



<p>6. Stay Informed and Engage:</p>



<ul class="nv-cv-d nv-cv-m wp-block-list">
<li><em>Action:</em> Stay updated on industry developments.</li>



<li><em>Consideration:</em> Regularly monitor industry reports, engage with relevant webinars, and consider scheduling guidance sessions with analysts to gain deeper insights into emerging trends and their implications for your organization.</li>
</ul>



<p>7. Diversify Cloud Strategy:</p>



<ul class="nv-cv-d nv-cv-m wp-block-list">
<li><em>Action:</em> Consider diversifying your cloud strategy.</li>



<li><em>Consideration:</em> Explore the potential benefits of a multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud strategy, considering the evolving landscape and possible shifts in the market.</li>
</ul>



<p>8. Educate Stakeholders:</p>



<ul class="nv-cv-d nv-cv-m wp-block-list">
<li><em>Action:</em> Educate key stakeholders within your organization.</li>



<li><em>Consideration:</em> Share relevant insights with decision-makers, IT teams, and financial stakeholders to align strategies and ensure a comprehensive understanding of the challenges and opportunities outlined in the predictions.</li>
</ul>



<p>9. Adaptability and Agility:</p>



<ul class="nv-cv-d nv-cv-m wp-block-list">
<li><em>Action:</em> Foster adaptability and agility in your cloud strategy.</li>



<li><em>Consideration:</em> Cultivate an organizational culture that embraces change, innovation, and the ability to pivot strategies based on evolving industry trends and technology advancements.</li>
</ul>



<p>By integrating these actionable steps and considerations, organizations can proactively position themselves to thrive in the rapidly evolving landscape of cloud computing in 2024 and beyond.</p>
<div class="saboxplugin-wrap" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person" itemscope itemprop="author"><div class="saboxplugin-tab"><div class="saboxplugin-gravatar"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Elizabeth-Wallace-RTInsights-141x150-1.jpg" width="100"  height="100" alt="" itemprop="image"></div><div class="saboxplugin-authorname"><a href="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/author/elizabeth-wallace/" class="vcard author" rel="author"><span class="fn">Elizabeth Wallace</span></a></div><div class="saboxplugin-desc"><div itemprop="description"><p>Elizabeth Wallace is a Nashville-based freelance writer with a soft spot for data science and AI and a background in linguistics. She spent 13 years teaching language in higher ed and now helps startups and other organizations explain &#8211; clearly &#8211; what it is they do.</p>
</div></div><div class="clearfix"></div></div></div>]]></content:encoded>
					
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		<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">4874</post-id>	</item>
		<item>
		<title>Addressing FinOps and Security Issues with Automated Cloud Operations</title>
		<link>https://www.clouddatainsights.com/addressing-finops-and-security-issues-with-automated-cloud-operations/</link>
					<comments>https://www.clouddatainsights.com/addressing-finops-and-security-issues-with-automated-cloud-operations/#respond</comments>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Salvatore Salamone]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 15 May 2023 18:34:01 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Cloud Strategy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Governance]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sponsored]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cloud security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FinOps]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.clouddatainsights.com/?p=2930</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[Hitachi Ventara’s Taqi Hasan discusses cost management and security challenges enterprises face today and how automated Hitachi Ventara services can help.]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/cloud-Depositphotos_350497404_S.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-2933" width="750" height="500" srcset="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/cloud-Depositphotos_350497404_S.jpg 1000w, https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/cloud-Depositphotos_350497404_S-300x200.jpg 300w, https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/cloud-Depositphotos_350497404_S-768x512.jpg 768w, https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/cloud-Depositphotos_350497404_S-930x620.jpg 930w" sizes="(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption"><em>Hitachi Vantara’s Taqi Hasan discusses cost management and security challenges enterprises face today and how automated Hitachi Vantara services can help.</em></figcaption></figure></div>


<p><em>Sponsored by Hitachi Vantara</em></p>



<p>The complexity of hybrid and multi-cloud environments makes it hard for enterprises to get insights into their cloud spending and security risks. Tools from the providers only go so far, and most only provide data for that provider&#8217;s services.</p>



<p>RTInsights recently sat down with Taqi Hasan, Director, Global Services Marketing, Cloud and App Modernization, at Hitachi Vantara to discuss the cost management and security challenges enterprises face today and how FinOps, automation, and Hitachi Vantara services can help bring both cloud spending and security under control.</p>



<p>Here is a summary of our conversation.</p>



<p><strong>RTInsights: Why are cloud costs so hard to quantify and understand in businesses today?</strong></p>



<p><strong>Hitachi Vantara:</strong> There are multiple reasons. One is complexity vis-à-vis each of the offerings from the cloud service providers such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google GCP, etc. They all can be complex and dynamic with constantly changing resource usage patterns and pricing models. They frequently keep changing pricing models to compete better with each other. And all cloud offerings have different service options, as well. These factors make it difficult to accurately forecast cloud costs and understand how they&#8217;re being incurred.</p>



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<p>A second factor is the lack of visibility. Everyone sees the benefit of cloud, and they are rushing to it. Then, they keep adding new services. As such, many businesses struggle to gain complete visibility into their usage and spending because there are different departments in the company getting access to cloud, and they all have different use cases.</p>



<p>They don&#8217;t have centralized monitoring tools, and they have difficulty tracking usage across multiple cloud platforms. For example, some of our customers, especially in the financial industry, want to hedge their bets by having their applications and workloads on different clouds. If one cloud goes down, the other one is there. Visibility is often lacking in that scenario.</p>



<p>Another factor is shadow IT. Gartner coined this term when individual departments in an organization are using cloud services without IT knowledge approval. It is a challenge to track and manage these cloud services and expenses. For example, multiple departments or groups could be using the same services. Salesforce is a good example. Sales and marketing could be using it for different purposes. That creates unpredictable demand. Cloud elasticity would allow both groups to quickly scale up or down as demand changes. That makes it a challenge to accurately forecast the cost and predict how much resources are needed at any given time.</p>



<p>Lastly, there are multiple pricing models. Each provider offers a variety of pricing models. These are pay-as-you-go, monthly, one-year subscriptions, three-year subscriptions,&nbsp; reserved instances, etc. Many businesses don&#8217;t understand these pricing models. Selecting the most cost-effective option can be challenging, especially for large enterprises.</p>



<p><strong>RTInsights: How are businesses using FinOps to optimize their cloud costs?</strong></p>



<p><strong>Hitachi Vantara</strong>: FinOps is a set of practices and tools that businesses use to optimize their cloud cost. Many companies are using FinOps as part of a cloud cost management framework. This new framework provides a centralized view of the cloud cost and helps make informed decisions about cloud spending.</p>



<p>Hitachi Vantara comes in by helping businesses implement cloud visibility and control. Our tools provide real-time insights into cloud usage that can be used to control spending and cloud cost take out.</p>



<p>Obviously, the cloud providers don&#8217;t provide these kinds of tools. They want you to spend more. Our tools allow businesses to find their cost inefficiencies in the cloud instances and then take action to optimize the spending.</p>



<p>We apply automation and use data analytics to identify opportunities for cost optimization. That makes it easier to analyze usage patterns and identify areas where a business can scale down resources or switch to more cost-effective pricing models.</p>



<p>One other aspect of FinOps use is collaboration between teams. Many businesses are using FinOps to promote collaboration in different teams inside the company. It might include finance, IT, product development, product marketing, sales, and more. All these teams can then identify the different aspects of their cloud usage and how they can cut down the costs.</p>



<p>Overall FinOps provides a structured approach to control and lower the cost of cloud services for the enterprise.</p>



<p><strong>RTInsights: How does FinOps specifically help with cost takeout?</strong></p>



<p><strong><strong>Hitachi Vantara</strong>:</strong> Beyond using FinOps to understand cloud costs, it can also help with cost takeout. By implementing FinOps, businesses get a better understanding of the usage and identifying areas where they can optimize cloud. For example, a business might be using a lot of reserved and spot instances while having underutilized resources.</p>



<p>They get into that situation by adding and expanding cloud services but never decommissioning the services when they stop using them. So, they&#8217;re still paying the monthly subscription fee, for example, through AWS. FinOps can help find those underutilized or unused resources, allowing the business to optimize the workloads to curb cost.</p>



<p>Another way FinOps helps is by enabling data-driven decision-making. We do an assessment, then give businesses the tools to provide real-time data and analytics. They can then look at their cloud investments and have access to cost information. That lets them then make smarter decisions about their cloud usage so they can optimize the cost and reduce waste.</p>



<p>Once you discover where you are wasting money and where you&#8217;re not using the resources, then you come up with cost governance policies. If you find out there are holes in your cloud strategy, you can create a cost governance framework so that all your cloud spending is now aligned with the company&#8217;s overall goals and budget and spending limits. FinOps and our tools can be used to closely monitor usage, enforce policies for resource allocation, and more.</p>



<p>If some department comes up and says, &#8220;We need new instances, we need new regions.&#8221; You go through these governance policies to approve or deny those requests. That gets back to the collaboration aspect of FinOps. You can use those opportunities to cut costs.</p>



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<p>So, with FinOps, you&#8217;re basically continuously monitoring and optimizing cloud costs inside the company. Ideally, this information would be used to get the best value from cloud investments and reduce costs over time.</p>



<p><strong>RTInsights: Can we talk about some of the security aspects that Hitachi Vantara and the HARCs address?</strong></p>



<p><strong><strong>Hitachi Vantara</strong>:</strong> Security has become a top challenge for customers. Cloud security is particularly challenging, especially when people fail to understand that cloud security is a shared responsibility. Some think that once you move everything to the cloud, the cloud provider takes care of it. It&#8217;s not true. They only take care of the infrastructure part of it. The customer has to own everything else.</p>



<p>The number one cloud security issue customers face today is security misconfiguration. Because clouds are so agile and elastic, this increases the likelihood of a security misconfiguration. Minor misconfigurations can lead to massive hacks and the leaking of information from data breaches, costing businesses lots of money.</p>



<p>Another issue is the increased cloud attack surface. When everything was on-premises, you had firewalls protecting the enterprise and the data center. But the cloud is public! That means anyone has access to it.</p>



<p>Also, more organizations are adopting a remote/hybrid work model, which started during the pandemic. They are using more SaaS applications (e.g., Salesforce, Microsoft Office 65, or Google Apps) to support this model. The attack surface on these apps is increasing.</p>



<p>The cloud transformation that we’ve seen in the last five years has been huge. It&#8217;s been the speed of cloud for some of the transformations. With so much transformation happening in the cloud, new services are being built. Amazon adds multiple services every month to AWS, and customers use the services to increase productivity. They&#8217;re built fast. The rate is much faster than what used to happen on-premises when customers used to build their own applications or other services. This increases security vulnerabilities at a fast rate.</p>



<p>Additionally, compliance in the cloud is much more complicated compared to managing compliance for isolated on-premises data centers. In regulated industries like healthcare, financial services, and others, compliance requirements are changing every day, and enterprises have to keep up with them.</p>



<p><strong>RTInsights: Are the skill sets keeping pace?</strong></p>



<p><strong><strong>Hitachi Vantara</strong>:</strong> No. The collapse of skillsets is contributing to the cloud security challenges business face today.</p>



<p>Cloud-native skillset requires strong infrastructure, security, networking, and application development experience. The DevSecOps approach that we offer in our framework takes a holistic engineer-led approach to optimize all these processes and technologies.</p>



<p>It&#8217;s a build-and-operate approach. It basically enables us to build security into the cloud environment as part of the design. We continuously monitor for security and compliance issues. It&#8217;s integrated into the software development lifecycle, the SDLC, not as an afterthought but from the design, build, and release stages all the way to production.</p>



<p>So, rather than treat security as an afterthought, we make it an integral part of the cloud environment design process. That mitigates many security issues from the start.</p>



<p>We also do the visibility and security management through our cloud security platform. We have a multi-level defense approach. We call this our 5C approach because we are ensuring the security of the enterprise across cloud, clusters, containers, consumer data, and the code.</p>



<p><strong>RTInsights: Any final thoughts?</strong></p>



<p><strong><strong>Hitachi Vantara</strong>:</strong> Unlike the traditional data center that only had to protect the perimeter with firewalls, the cloud is layered, and it has a big attack surface. It has no perimeter. Our DevSecOps approach helps protect that environment.</p>



<p>What’s needed to mitigate cloud security challenges is to have good visibility into your environment so that you can identify security gaps and misconfiguration. Then you can manage them through our five C&#8217;s approach and do regulatory compliance management, as well. We provide tools for that.</p>



<p>Then finally, there is the automation aspect to all of this. We have the Hitachi cloud acceleration operations platform, which allows you to do this automation and allows customers to automate this integrated approach as a scale-up in our DevSecOps teams.</p>



<p>In that way, DevSecOps teams use their engineering expertise to create these automation bots that constantly are looking for and remediating many of the issues when they come up. Those are the best practices we use to address today’s cloud security threats.</p>



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<div class="saboxplugin-wrap" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person" itemscope itemprop="author"><div class="saboxplugin-tab"><div class="saboxplugin-gravatar"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/sal-headshot-150x150-1.webp" width="100"  height="100" alt="" itemprop="image"></div><div class="saboxplugin-authorname"><a href="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/author/ssalamone/" class="vcard author" rel="author"><span class="fn">Salvatore Salamone</span></a></div><div class="saboxplugin-desc"><div itemprop="description"><p>Salvatore Salamone is a physicist by training who has been writing about science and information technology for more than 30 years. During that time, he has been a senior or executive editor at many industry-leading publications including High Technology, Network World, Byte Magazine, Data Communications, LAN Times, InternetWeek, Bio-IT World, and Lightwave, The Journal of Fiber Optics. He also is the author of three business technology books.</p>
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		<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">2930</post-id>	</item>
		<item>
		<title>What is FinOps and How Do You Get Started?</title>
		<link>https://www.clouddatainsights.com/what-is-finops-and-how-do-you-get-started/</link>
					<comments>https://www.clouddatainsights.com/what-is-finops-and-how-do-you-get-started/#respond</comments>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Curry]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Thu, 04 May 2023 14:09:00 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Cloud Strategy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cloud costs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FinOps]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.clouddatainsights.com/?p=2517</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[FinOps is becoming one of the main ways leading-edge companies are getting a handle on cloud spend and maximum value out of their cloud services.]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/FinOps-2-Depositphotos_606389026_S.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-2519" width="719" height="423" srcset="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/FinOps-2-Depositphotos_606389026_S.jpg 958w, https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/FinOps-2-Depositphotos_606389026_S-300x177.jpg 300w, https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/FinOps-2-Depositphotos_606389026_S-768x452.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 719px) 100vw, 719px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption"><em>FinOps is becoming one of the main ways leading-edge companies are getting a handle on cloud spend and maximum value out of their cloud services.</em></figcaption></figure></div>


<p>One of the most frequently mentioned benefits of migrating to the cloud is a reduction in costs, but, as many organizations have found out, the cloud can quickly become more expensive than on-premises solutions due to unexpected cloud costs and investments.</p>



<p>The cloud offers businesses increased agility and flexibility, which lets them innovate at a faster rate and scale to meet the demands of users more easily. However, this on-demand consumption model makes it more difficult for businesses to scrutinize costs per month and if their cloud operations are optimized efficiently. The wide variety of add-on services offered by cloud service providers adds further complexity, as services may be utilized and understood only by individual business units.</p>



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<p>FinOps is one of the main ways leading companies are getting a handle on cloud spend. It is a set of industry-wide practices to get the maximum value out of cloud services, which also fosters better communication and collaboration between business and engineering teams.</p>



<p>To begin, organizations need to get a complete overview of their cloud ecosystem, down to each business unit, project, and even team level. With this, business leaders can be aware of any inconsistencies in the amount of resources being dedicated to a project or team, alongside more effectively aligning resources to business outcomes and goals. This assessment can also provide organizations with clear metrics to compare with industry benchmarking and performance, helping to identify if costs are similar to the industry average.</p>



<p><strong>See also: </strong><a href="https://www.rtinsights.com/billions-wasted-on-cloud-migration/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Over $100 Billion Wasted On Cloud Migration Overruns</a></p>



<p>Once the assessment has been completed, organizations should create a set of goals and strategies aimed at cost optimization. The use of KPIs and governance rules should enable teams to easily track costs and performance-related metrics either weekly, monthly, or quarterly and be able to report any fluctuations in cost with reasons as to why that has happened. With this real-time data being shared across multiple teams, business leaders can make more informed decisions to optimize costs further, such as moving to multi-cloud or hybrid cloud architecture.</p>



<p>After establishing the KPIs and governance rules, organizations should look to automate for cost avoidance and reduction, through the use of solutions that can interpret the business goals set out in the assessment stage and provide continuous cost optimization. Autonomous services, which, when coupled with artificial intelligence and machine learning, provide actionable insights, can utilize all of the data collected in KPIs to reduce the amount of risk involved in cloud budgets.</p>



<p><strong>See also: </strong><a href="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/finops-becomes-more-important-as-cloud-spending-grows/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">FinOps Becomes More Important as Cloud Spending Grows</a></p>



<p>While this sounds straightforward, there can be a lot of roadblocks in the FinOps journey. Like DevOps and other subdivisions of this practice, it needs high-level buy-in from multiple team leaders alongside C-Suite executives. Without this, organizations cannot get a clear picture of cloud spend and will not be able to optimize cost reduction effectively. Organizations also need to make a decision early on whether to utilize a dedicated FinOps platform, utilize a larger operations platform, or build one themselves.</p>



<p><a href="https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS50037523" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">According to IDC</a>, cloud infrastructure spending in 2022 grew 19.6% year over year to $88.1 billion – a noticeable increase from 8.6% annual growth in 2021. And cloud costs are expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 10.5 to 13.1 percent to 2025.</p>



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<p>Early investment in cloud cost management solutions can ensure that organizations do not feel this increase in cloud costs by improving the efficiency of cloud services and reducing the amount of cloud waste. That can also provide focus to organizations looking for more control over costs. That was a major theme for technology companies in 2022 when many companies had to switch from a growth-first to a profitability model to keep investors and shareholders happy. That mode of operation is still in effect now.</p>
<div class="saboxplugin-wrap" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person" itemscope itemprop="author"><div class="saboxplugin-tab"><div class="saboxplugin-gravatar"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/curry-150x150-1.webp" width="100"  height="100" alt="" itemprop="image"></div><div class="saboxplugin-authorname"><a href="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/author/david-curry/" class="vcard author" rel="author"><span class="fn">David Curry</span></a></div><div class="saboxplugin-desc"><div itemprop="description"><div class="author-info">
<div class="author-description">
<p>David is a technology writer with several years experience covering all aspects of IoT, from technology to networks to security.</p>
</div>
</div>
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<article id="post-47305" class="entry-grid first-grid post-47305 post type-post status-publish format-standard has-post-thumbnail hentry category-aiops tag-aiops tag-observability">
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		<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">2517</post-id>	</item>
		<item>
		<title>5 Areas Where FinOps Tools Fall Short</title>
		<link>https://www.clouddatainsights.com/5-areas-where-finops-tools-fall-short/</link>
					<comments>https://www.clouddatainsights.com/5-areas-where-finops-tools-fall-short/#respond</comments>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Willy Sennott]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 17 Apr 2023 11:55:16 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Cloud Strategy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cloud strategy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cloud tools]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FinOps]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.clouddatainsights.com/?p=2654</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[Cloud cost optimization is tricky in the real world, but FinOps tools are an underrated resource. Find out what they can--and can't--do here.]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Depositphotos_97413774_S.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-2655" width="750" height="503" srcset="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Depositphotos_97413774_S.jpg 1000w, https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Depositphotos_97413774_S-300x201.jpg 300w, https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Depositphotos_97413774_S-768x515.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption"><em>Getting real value out of FinOps tools requires a clear understanding of what they can and cannot accomplish.</em></figcaption></figure></div>


<p>In a simpler world, optimizing your cloud spending would be as easy as deploying a FinOps tool, receiving recommendations to reduce costs and acting upon them.</p>



<p>Cloud cost optimization is much more complicated in the real world. Although FinOps tools provide useful data and insights that may serve as a starting-point for discussions about managing cloud costs, FinOps software on its own is only one of the many ingredients that go into effective cloud cost optimization.</p>



<p>Allow me to explain by discussing what FinOps can do, and which gaps you need to fill in to get real value out of FinOps tools.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">What are FinOps tools, and what can they do?</h3>



<p>When I talk about FinOps tools, I&#8217;m referring to any software that automatically assesses cloud environments and configurations, then generates insights or recommendations designed to help businesses reduce their spending. <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/compute-optimizer/">AWS Compute Optimizer</a> and <a href="https://cloud.google.com/recommender/docs/overview">GCP Recommender</a> are examples of FinOps tools from major cloud providers, and you can also find various third-party FinOps solutions on the market.</p>



<p>Most FinOps tools work by collecting and analyzing data about your cloud spending, as well as your workload performance. Then, they highlight opportunities to reduce costs without compromising on performance, or to improve performance without increasing costs. For example, if a FinOps tool detects that a workload hosted on an EC2 instance never consumes more than 50 percent of the total compute and memory resources allocated to that instance, it would likely recommend switching to a more cost-effective instance type – one that delivers the same workload performance at a lower cost – because the workload probably doesn&#8217;t need all of the resources available to it through the current instance.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Where FinOps tools fall short</h3>



<p>Again, these types of insights are useful starting-points for identifying ways to save money in the cloud. But they&#8217;re hardly the be-all, end-all of cloud cost optimization, because there are many important tasks related to optimizing cloud spending that FinOps tools simply can&#8217;t address.</p>



<p>Let&#8217;s look at those gaps in FinOps tools one-by-one.</p>



<ol class="nv-cv-d nv-cv-m wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Workload architecture</strong></li>
</ol>



<p>FinOps software can analyze performance metrics from your workloads, but that&#8217;s not the same as knowing how the workloads are configured internally and whether there are opportunities for optimizing that configuration.</p>



<p>For example, your FinOps software might be able to monitor how much CPU a VM is consuming. But most FinOps tools have no way of knowing whether the workload hosted on the VM could alternatively be deployed using containers on a Kubernetes cluster that you already have running in the cloud. In general, FinOps tools can only recommend alternative configurations for running a workload on the same category of service, not making a change that would require switching to a new type of workload architecture.</p>



<ol class="nv-cv-d nv-cv-m wp-block-list" start="2">
<li><strong>Governance rules</strong></li>
</ol>



<p>In some cases, you might be running workloads in a sub-optimal way from a cost perspective due to governance rules that exist within your business, but which your FinOps tools have no way of understanding.</p>



<p>Maybe you need to use a certain cloud region or availability zone for compliance reasons, for example, even though it costs more than choosing a different configuration. Or, maybe you do blue-green deployments as part of a company policy, which leads to some redundancy in your infrastructure because you have to operate multiple hosting environments simultaneously. These are critical considerations that affect cloud spending, but your FinOps software can&#8217;t factor them in when it makes recommendations. The result is automated cost-savings suggestions that don&#8217;t make sense in many cases for your business.</p>



<ol class="nv-cv-d nv-cv-m wp-block-list" start="3">
<li><strong>Changing business plans</strong></li>
</ol>



<p>Along similar lines, FinOps tools have no way of knowing what&#8217;s coming next in your business, or how changing imperatives may impact cloud spending.</p>



<p>For example, perhaps you are currently overspending on hosting for a particular workload, but your developers will soon be pushing out a major update to that workload that will make the hosting configuration more cost-effective. Here again, without this important context, the recommendations that FinOps tools make are of little value.</p>



<ol class="nv-cv-d nv-cv-m wp-block-list" start="4">
<li><strong>Business processes</strong></li>
</ol>



<p>To a large extent, the amount of money you spend in the cloud hinges not on how your workloads are configured or which technologies you use to host them, but on the operational processes that your business deploys to manage them.</p>



<p>As a basic example, take tagging, which means labeling cloud resources so that they are easy to track and monitor. Tagging is a very basic best practice that plays a central role in cost management by helping businesses to understand the purpose of different workloads. If you&#8217;re not labeling workloads systematically, or if the tags you choose are difficult to interpret, you&#8217;re probably overspending due to a lack of visibility into your workload status.</p>



<p>Unfortunately, FinOps tools have no way of knowing whether your business&#8217;s tagging policy is appropriate for your needs. It&#8217;s not something they are designed to understand. They could tell you whether or not you&#8217;re using tags at all, but not much beyond that.</p>



<ol class="nv-cv-d nv-cv-m wp-block-list" start="5">
<li><strong>Human relationships</strong></li>
</ol>



<p>Perhaps the area where FinOps tools fall the shortest of all is in interpreting the complexities of human relationships and understanding how they impact a business&#8217;s ability to cut cloud costs.</p>



<p>Cost optimization bridges the domains of finance and engineering and requires support from multiple stakeholders. Automated cost-savings recommendations are not very useful if the teams that are trying to act on them lack support from the C-suite for their cost optimization initiative, for example, or if engineers see cost-optimization as a pointless exercise that gets in the way of their work.</p>



<p>Navigating these relationship nuances – and making sure that all stakeholders buy into cost optimization – is not something FinOps tools can do. Only humans with extensive experience in bridging the gaps between technology and people can handle this work.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">FinOps Tools are a means toward an end, not the end</h3>



<p>In short, FinOps tools are one critical resource for helping to optimize cloud spending. But because they lack the ability to understand crucial context about workload configurations, business imperatives and human relationships and behavior, FinOps software is only part of the puzzle. You also need the right people and processes to support your FinOps initiatives if you want to achieve real value.</p>
<div class="saboxplugin-wrap" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person" itemscope itemprop="author"><div class="saboxplugin-tab"><div class="saboxplugin-gravatar"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/willy-sennott.jpg" width="100"  height="100" alt="" itemprop="image"></div><div class="saboxplugin-authorname"><a href="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/author/willy-sennott/" class="vcard author" rel="author"><span class="fn">Willy Sennott</span></a></div><div class="saboxplugin-desc"><div itemprop="description"><p><em>Willy Sennott is the EVP of FinOps at </em><strong><em><a href="http://www.vegacloud.io/">Vega Cloud</a></em></strong><em>. He has 25+ years&#8217; experience in financial, marketing and business analytics data, helping clients and companies drive revenue growth, improve cost efficiencies, and effectively allocate capital. At Vega Cloud, Sennott leads the FinOps practice and helps drive overall company strategy and product roadmap. </em></p>
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		<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">2654</post-id>	</item>
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		<title>37Signals on Leaving the Cloud</title>
		<link>https://www.clouddatainsights.com/37signals-on-leaving-the-cloud/</link>
					<comments>https://www.clouddatainsights.com/37signals-on-leaving-the-cloud/#respond</comments>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Curry]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Fri, 24 Feb 2023 17:07:29 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Migration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cloud costs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FinOps]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[repatriation]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.clouddatainsights.com/?p=2419</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[The key reason for 37signals' shift back to on-premise is cost, and the change in economics over the past five years in regards to running on-premise storage and compute. ]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/repatriation-2-Depositphotos_98998286_S.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-2421" width="746" height="523" srcset="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/repatriation-2-Depositphotos_98998286_S.jpg 994w, https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/repatriation-2-Depositphotos_98998286_S-300x210.jpg 300w, https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/repatriation-2-Depositphotos_98998286_S-768x539.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 746px) 100vw, 746px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption"><em>The key reason for the shift back to on-premise is cost, and the change in economics over the past five years.</em></figcaption></figure></div>


<p>Cloud migration has accelerated over the past two years, as more businesses look to move their operations either partly or fully onto cloud servers. While there are plenty of benefits to migrating to the cloud, some businesses are finding the grass is not as green as they were sold when they originally packed up and moved, especially when it comes to cost. </p>



<p>In a podcast episode, 37signals partner David Heinemeier Hansson and director of operations Eron Nicholson discussed the company’s move away from public cloud and back to on-premise. This was published after Hansson’s <a href="https://world.hey.com/dhh/why-we-re-leaving-the-cloud-654b47e0" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">blogpost on the subject</a>, which received a lot of traction on social media. </p>



<p>The key reason for the company&#8217;s shift back to on-premise is cost, and the change in economics over the past five years in regards to running on-premise storage and compute. “Like the hype cycle for cloud is now a decade plus old. And I think there are a lot of other companies like ours who are starting to have doubts as to whether the all cloud all the time is the right answer. They keep getting these astronomical bills,” said Hansson. </p>



<p>Hansson disclosed that 37signals currently has a cloud budget of around $3 million a year, which is an enormous figure for a medium-sized organization that does not have a huge amount of traffic. Even though this comes with a lot of services such as database, search, and analytics, in terms of raw cost of materials, the difference is rather large.</p>



<p><strong>See also:</strong> <a href="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/why-is-cloud-repatriation-happening/">Why is Cloud Repatriation Happening?</a></p>



<p>Illustrating the point, Hansson said that the cost of 12 terabytes of N V M E storage, which the company uses for its Hey email service, was once “tens of thousands of dollars of exotic equipment that had to be bought from specialist vendors, like really enterprisey esoteric stuff,” but only cost the company $3,000 in 2022.</p>



<p>This divide in the price of storage, CPU, and GPU and the comparative costs of renting these servers from a cloud storage provider is very acute for businesses that don’t have fluctuating amounts of traffic. For 37signals, traffic is consistent and there is not a day when it sees over three or four times the normal traffic, unlike Shopify or Shein, which have specific days like Black Friday where they might have over 50 times the normal traffic.&nbsp;</p>



<p>In these cases, having a cloud server to control the massive amounts of traffic is a good thing, as it can keep the business operational at the most important times. Hansson notes that being fully on cloud with the launch of Hey was a good thing, as there was ten times the expected usage within the first three weeks. </p>



<p><strong>See also:</strong> <a href="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/youve-migrated-to-the-cloud-now-what-4-critical-cost-saving-practices/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">You’ve Migrated to the Cloud, Now What? 4 Critical Cost-Saving Practices</a></p>



<p>Speaking of the move from the cloud, Nicholson said it would be a multi-year process: “It’s going to involve standing up basically similar sized resources as what we have in the cloud. And then making a slow calculated move to turn individual services off one at a time and make sure that they work and make sure the monitoring is set up and our customers are happy. And that should take months if, if not years to move everything off that we moved on.”</p>
<div class="saboxplugin-wrap" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person" itemscope itemprop="author"><div class="saboxplugin-tab"><div class="saboxplugin-gravatar"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/curry-150x150-1.webp" width="100"  height="100" alt="" itemprop="image"></div><div class="saboxplugin-authorname"><a href="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/author/david-curry/" class="vcard author" rel="author"><span class="fn">David Curry</span></a></div><div class="saboxplugin-desc"><div itemprop="description"><div class="author-info">
<div class="author-description">
<p>David is a technology writer with several years experience covering all aspects of IoT, from technology to networks to security.</p>
</div>
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		<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">2419</post-id>	</item>
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		<title>FinOps Becomes More Important as Cloud Spending Grows</title>
		<link>https://www.clouddatainsights.com/finops-becomes-more-important-as-cloud-spending-grows/</link>
					<comments>https://www.clouddatainsights.com/finops-becomes-more-important-as-cloud-spending-grows/#respond</comments>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Salvatore Salamone]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Sun, 25 Sep 2022 20:27:06 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Cloud Strategy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cloud costs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FinOps]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.clouddatainsights.com/?p=1845</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[Businesses need FinOps solutions to aid them in monitoring, controlling, and optimizing their cloud spending to ensure they get the most value from such investments. ]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/finops-Depositphotos_606851134_S.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-1846" width="750" height="415" srcset="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/finops-Depositphotos_606851134_S.jpg 1000w, https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/finops-Depositphotos_606851134_S-300x166.jpg 300w, https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/finops-Depositphotos_606851134_S-768x425.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px" /><figcaption>Businesses need FinOps solutions to help them monitor, control, and optimize their cloud spending to ensure they get the most value from such investments.</figcaption></figure></div>


<p>Cloud spending is on the rise as businesses move more and more of their data, applications, and infrastructure to cloud. Some estimate that cloud computing costs average about 20 percent of total IT spending or more. And that spending is growing rapidly. Unfortunately, many businesses have little visibility into that spending. That is a critical factor that is bringing great attention to FinOps.</p>



<p>Intel defines FinOps as&nbsp;“a management practice that promotes shared responsibility for an organization&#8217;s cloud computing infrastructure and costs.” And the <a href="//www.finops.org" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">FinOps Foundation</a> says it is “an evolving cloud financial management discipline and cultural practice that enables organizations to get maximum business value by helping engineering, finance, technology and business teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions.” &nbsp;</p>



<p>Some say FinOps is short for financial operations. Many others say it is the blending of finance and DevOps, where the heart of the matter is ensuring increased communications and collaboration between business and engineering teams.</p>



<p>There are many other definitions, all of which center on FinOps giving businesses the ability to monitor and optimize cloud spending.</p>



<p><strong>See also: </strong><a href="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/are-cloud-costs-and-sprawl-casting-a-shadow-how-finops-can-help/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Are Cloud Costs and Sprawl Casting a Shadow? How FinOps Can Help</a></p>



<p>Why is that so important? There are many reasons. A couple of the biggest ones are:</p>



<p><strong>Massive cloud spending that is only going to grow:</strong> A recent <a href="https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2022-04-19-gartner-forecasts-worldwide-public-cloud-end-user-spending-to-reach-nearly-500-billion-in-2022">Gartner forecast</a> found worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 20.4% this year to a total of $494.7 billion, up from $410.9 billion in 2021. In 2023, end-user spending is expected to reach nearly $600 billion, according to the same forecast. Cloud spending is expected to continue to grow after that. <a href="https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2022-02-09-gartner-says-more-than-half-of-enterprise-it-spending" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Gartner predicts</a> that enterprise IT spending on public cloud computing will overtake spending on traditional IT in 2025.</p>



<p><strong>Lack of visibility into cloud spending:</strong> In an <a href="https://www.rtinsights.com/why-is-cloud-repatriation-happening/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">earlier RTInsights article</a>, Paige Roberts, Open Source Relations Manager at Vertica, a Micro Focus company, noted: “The advantage of cloud managed services is more about ease of use, speed to deployment, easy administration – not cost savings. Cloud costs are far higher than most organizations expected when they made the leap.”</p>



<p>Additionally, she noted that cloud analytics workload costs often vary wildly and unpredictably from month to month. “It is not an easy thing to explain to a CFO why your department needs six times the budget this month over last month. Not only do costs fluctuate on cloud analytics platforms, but they often do so automatically. Some cloud analytic services tout compute auto-scaling as a feature while charging by how much compute you use. This means that without the knowledge or control, the costs are automatically scaled upward.”</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Enter FinOps</h3>



<p>In its <a href="https://data.finops.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">State of FinOps 2022 report</a>, the FinOps Foundation found that Global 2000 companies continue to adopt FinOps. It also found that “FinOps isn’t just a technical discipline nor solely finance-based – it’s a cultural one that brings together finance, engineering, product, and management.”</p>



<p>One challenge many businesses find is that there is no one tool to help with all aspects of FinOps. As would be expected, many businesses start with their cloud provider. All of the major cloud providers offer tools to help monitor and manage spending at a basic level. Most provide basics, like cloud resource consumption.</p>



<p>The problem is that businesses have a hard time tying spending back to specific departments, groups, and projects. The issues get worse in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. The tools from the providers are typically focused on that provider’s services and associated spending. And many tools do not tightly integrate into existing budgeting and forecasting solutions.</p>



<p>As a result, most businesses use multiple tools to help with their FinOps efforts. In fact, the FinOps Foundation found that &#8220;many respondents continue to rely on a mix of native tooling provided by AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, and third-party tools,&nbsp;<strong>with an average of 3.7 tools being used</strong>. It also found, surprisingly, that “homegrown tooling solutions are the ones with a marked increase compared to last year.”</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">A final word</h3>



<p>As cloud spending grows, businesses need insights into how much is being spent and what value different business units and groups get from their cloud spending.</p>



<p>They need FinOps solutions that provide the details and aid them in controlling and optimizing their cloud spending to ensure they get the most value from such investments.</p>
<div class="saboxplugin-wrap" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person" itemscope itemprop="author"><div class="saboxplugin-tab"><div class="saboxplugin-gravatar"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/sal-headshot-150x150-1.webp" width="100"  height="100" alt="" itemprop="image"></div><div class="saboxplugin-authorname"><a href="https://www.clouddatainsights.com/author/ssalamone/" class="vcard author" rel="author"><span class="fn">Salvatore Salamone</span></a></div><div class="saboxplugin-desc"><div itemprop="description"><p>Salvatore Salamone is a physicist by training who has been writing about science and information technology for more than 30 years. During that time, he has been a senior or executive editor at many industry-leading publications including High Technology, Network World, Byte Magazine, Data Communications, LAN Times, InternetWeek, Bio-IT World, and Lightwave, The Journal of Fiber Optics. He also is the author of three business technology books.</p>
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