Author
Richa Kapoor, Associate Product Manager
Executive Summary
The Blog focusses on how FinOps landscape is evolving and how this shift is changing the way companies look at cloud financial management. Latest Trends and Optimization Levers of FinOps have been highlighted as well . Furthermore, the Business Challenges faced by companies during their Finops journey are discussed and how Concierto Maximize can help navigate those challenges.
FinOps – Why Does it matter?
The cloud financial management landscape has witnessed a major paradigm shift in recent years. The FinOps ecosystem is evolving at a rapid pace attributing to disruptions in AI, ML and Data Analytics. The scope of FinOps has expanded magnificently to enhance the business value of cloud and not just merely focus on reducing the cloud costs. We can clearly see a new era of cloud transformation emerging with FinOps certainly taking the centre stage.
Business Challenges
As more and more organizations are migrating their workloads to cloud, there has been a massive demand for sophisticated tools to manage cloud migration and cloud investments. Organizations are seeking out ways to monitor their costs, plan their budgets and optimize their cloud spends. There is a need for a tool that not only helps in reporting, planning but also in optimizing, remediating spend anomalies, management and governance of hybrid environments all at once place. Cloud spends are incomprehensible owing to lack of granularity and breakdown of the cost components. Moreover, organizations want to see the breakup of costs in a categorized way. As data volumes increase, unexpected cloud costs can lead to high spikes in billing which can derail the budgets. Organizations are struggling to bring together the engineering, finance, and management teams to unleash the potential of collaboration. Moreover, recent economic downturns have fuelled the need for businesses to optimize their resource utilization.
Let’s deep dive into the FinOps optimization levers which can help businesses to enhance their efficiency and drive growth -
Visibility
A critical aspect of FinOps is tracking and analysing the cloud expenditures across services, budget planning and forecasting. You cannot improve what you cannot measure. Optimization calls for equipping the stakeholders with meaningful and actionable insights to promote data driven decisions. Organizations can monitor their resource utilization, set benchmarks, and track Key Performance Indicators in real time to take timely decisions. FinOps practices advocate for a clear understanding of who is responsible for which cloud costs. This is achieved through cost allocation models, where cloud costs are attributed to specific business units, projects, or applications. Showback or chargeback models can be implemented to ensure accountability and cost optimization incentives.
Resource Management and Waste Reduction
One of the most important aspects of FinOps is identifying opportunities to enhance the cloud efficiencies and eliminating waste from unused resources. It becomes imperative for the financial management solution to simplify the complex commitment plans offered by the cloud service providers and offer recommendations for purchase plans. Here, the focus is on implementing practices such as rightsizing (scaling resources to match actual demand), Reserved Instances (committing to long-term usage for discounts) and identifying and eliminating idle resources.
Automation
The power of financial optimization lies in the integration of cost optimization practices into DevOps processes. This includes automating resource provisioning, scaling, and decommissioning, as well as incorporating cost considerations into the software development lifecycle. It allows organizations to streamline processes, improve efficiency, and enhance cost optimization efforts. Implementing automated policies and guardrails can help organizations enforce best practices, compliance requirements, and cost optimization strategies.
Continuous Improvement
Companies should embrace a culture of accountability and collaboration to evolve the FinOps practices and align the cloud financial activities to overall strategic needs of the organization. The entire FinOps ecosystem needs to be integrated with the help of Cloud Governance, SOPs, Trainings, Compliance, and Policies for effective cloud management. This also indicates the integration of collaboration tools for timely reporting and decision making.
Concierto’s approach to FinOps – A Real Software not a Framework
We help our clients to stay ahead of the curve by fine tuning the optimization levers of FinOps.. We understand that FinOps journey is an iterative process that goes way beyond cloud cost monitoring. Concierto Maximize is the automated platform that provides our clients with a competitive edge in the cloud space by incorporating resilience and agility in their cloud journey.
Concierto Maximize is a powerful cloud cost management and optimization platform designed to accelerate and simplify FinOps adoption; a one stop solution for 360-degree visibility and monitoring in multi-cloud environments. It not just tells you ‘What happened’ but helps you to plan and take data driven decisions.
Single Pane of Glass View
Concierto Maximize offers a single pane of glass view via centralized, hybrid-cloud cost dashboards across all AWS, Azure, GCP and On Prem accounts. It provides customizable real time dashboards and reports for cost analysis and analyzing trends. It also offers daily and resource level granularity, thereby facilitating efficient analysis and monitoring.
Automated Resource Optimization
Managing the cloud resources goes a long way from monitoring the usage to creating automated process to ensure optimal utilization levels. Concierto Maximize supports automated resource management of compute, storage, serverless services and container orchestration.
AI Driven Recommendations
Concierto Maximize generates Intelligent forecasts, cost optimization recommendations for subscriptions based on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning algorithms. It helps in automated resource rightsizing and facilitates Reserved Instance (RI) and Savings Plan management.
Governance and Compliance
The platform provides configurable policies and rules for cost governance and compliance, anomaly detection and alerting for cost anomalies, role-based views of performance control and audit trails. The maturity assessment module provides a holistic view of the client’s FinOps journey.
Collaboration and Accountability
Concierto Maximize is well equipped to provide shared cost accountability across teams and stakeholders. It offers integration with various ITSM and collaboration tools for cost discussions and decision-making. The customizable workflows for approval processes expedites the incident management process.
By leveraging Concierto . Maximize, organizations can streamline their FinOps journey, gain better control over cloud costs, and drive continuous cost optimization efforts. The platform's comprehensive features and seamless integration with existing cloud environments enable organizations to elevate their FinOps practices and achieve long-term cost savings.
Conclusion:
Implementing FinOps is a critical endeavor for organizations to maximize the value of their cloud investments. While the journey can be challenging, Concierto Maximize simplifies the process by providing a unified platform for cost visibility, optimization, governance, and collaboration. By partnering with Concierto.cloud, organizations can accelerate their FinOps adoption, optimize cloud costs, and foster a culture of continuous improvement in cloud cost management.
