One of the biggest benefits of cloud computing and a “cloud-first” strategy is the potential for cost savings.
One of the biggest benefits of cloud computing and a “cloud-first” strategy is the potential for cost savings. Moving to the cloud allows organizations to avoid many of the high costs associated with an on-premises IT infrastructure. With the cloud, they can access all the hardware, software, compute, and storage resources they need and then pay only for the resources they actually use. The cloud also makes it easy to scale operations without substantially increasing costs.
Even so, many companies fail to capture the cost benefits of their cloud infrastructure. Often, this is due to decentralized cloud operations management where various teams use the resources they need – but do not share responsibility for cloud costs. As a result, organizations struggle to control cloud costs and find that a lot of their cloud spend is going to waste.
In single-cloud environments, cost management is not a particularly complex endeavor. A single cloud means that it’s not very difficult to keep track of cloud usage and to understand the associated costs. It’s also fairly easy to find ways to optimize resource usage and cut costs where possible.
Multi-cloud environments however present a more complex infrastructure where cloud usage – and costs – are more opaque and therefore more difficult to track. In these environments, costs can easily spiral out of control if cloud resource usage is not properly monitored and managed.
Cloud cost optimization is only possible if the organization has full visibility into the entire cloud environment and all the resources within it. However, cloud visibility is exactly what most organizations don’t have. This lack of visibility into the cloud infrastructure increases the chances that resource deployments and usage – and ultimately, costs – can spiral out of control very quickly. Idle, overprovisioned, and underutilized resources also result in a significant proportion of cloud spend being wasted (47% according to the StormForge 2022 Kubernetes & Cloud Waste survey). These problems are especially prevalent when cloud operations are decentralized and there’s little or no accountability in how teams (or individuals) use resources and accrue costs.
The StormForge survey also found that cloud spend is on the rise and expected to increase by 20% YoY, which means that for almost all organizations, optimizing resource efficiency should be a priority. By updating the way they select instances and use cloud resources, companies can improve cloud resource efficiency and also reduce cloud costs. Here’s where a centralized cloud cost management strategy aka FinOps comes in.
The Cloud FinOps, short for financial operations, framework incorporates numerous best practices and principles that enable organizations to better control cloud spends, drive greater org-wide financial accountability, and realize higher value from their cloud investments. FinOps promotes shared responsibility for cloud costs across cross-functional teams, which allows them to work together to control these costs and reduce cloud spend waste.
Implementing FinOps practices enables all teams to get better visibility into the cloud architecture and its various costs. This information is essential to understand how cloud usage can be optimized and where costs can be reduced. To enable a FinOps culture, organizations often turn to cloud cost management solutions providing comprehensive monitoring, analytics, and reporting. This way they can better understand the current costs and forecast their cloud computing needs, and right-size resources depending on their specific (current and future) needs. All of this empowers them to plan and control cloud costs, enforce financial accountability across all teams, and ultimately, capture higher value from their cloud investments.
As organizations turn to multi-cloud strategies - to avoid the costly side effects of vendor lock-in - and data sovereignty becoming more and more a concern, many cloud cost management solutions fall short as they either focus on one or only a few cloud source providers, and then predominantly on hyperscalers.
To maximize the optimum use of cloud resources and control of cost, a different approach is required. An approach that unifies the management and optimization of cloud environments - on-prem, private, public or edge - and service providers - hyperscalers or regional vendors - to the benefit of centralized FinOps teams.
The emma multi-cloud management platform enables organizations to adopt a true multi-cloud FinOps approach. Cloud-agnostic by nature, unifying all cloud environments under centralized management, the emma platform provides multi-functional teams like IT, DevOps, business, and finance the insights they need to share responsibility and accountability for the company’s cloud infrastructure and its associated costs.
With the emma platform, they can set common standards for cloud spend management and identify cost drivers including cost of operations, hardware, software licensing, maintenance, support, and data storage. With emma’s real-time insights and centralized multi-cloud management, teams and managers can collectively plan and forecast resource usage and make more informed decisions to optimize the business value of cloud environments.
If you plan to implement multi-cloud FinOps practices in your organization, you need a comprehensive solution that will effectively enable the principles of FinOps.
The emma platform’s centralized management approach promotes collaboration among finance, technology, product, and business teams. In the platform, they work together in near real-time, aligning efforts to optimize cloud resource usage efficiently.
The emma platform provides advanced analytical capabilities of current and future cloud use and spend, ensuring that decisions regarding cloud usage are driven by the business value of the cloud. It emphasizes the use of unit economic and value-based metrics to make conscious trade-offs among cost, quality, and speed.
The platform’s non-technical, intuitive interface and no-code approach empowers individuals and teams to take ownership of their cloud usage, pushing accountability to the edge. Project-based structuring, makes engineers responsible for cost considerations from architecture design to ongoing operations.
FinOps data is available in real-time, facilitating timely decision-making, autonomous cloud utilization, and efficient behavior based on fast feedback loops.
By unifying all information from multiple cloud environments into a single dashboard, the establishment of a centralized FinOps team is encouraged, promoting best practices and shared accountability, akin to security. This central team focuses on rate optimization, allowing technical teams to concentrate on usage optimization.
The platform encourages embracing a cloud-agnostic, variable cost model of the cloud as an opportunity to deliver value. It promotes just-in-time prediction, planning, and purchasing, agile iterative planning, and proactive system design for continuous cloud optimization.
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