Author
Harsha Vardhan, Group Manager, Marketing
Introduction
In the rapidly evolving world of cloud computing, merely monitoring your cloud infrastructure is no longer sufficient. Many organizations make the critical mistake of focusing solely on migration and management, neglecting the vital aspect of cloud optimization. By not thinking about optimization, businesses miss out on the opportunity to maximize the value of their cloud investments. This oversight can lead to inefficiencies, increased costs, and suboptimal performance. To stay competitive, businesses must go beyond basic management and take proactive steps to optimize and maximize their cloud environments. Concierto’s Maximize solution offers deep insights and comprehensive analytics to help businesses fully leverage their hybrid cloud environments, ensuring they not only observe but also enhance their cloud performance and value. This article explores how Concierto's Maximize solution transcends observation to deliver actionable insights and optimization capabilities.
Practical Challenges Faced in Multi-Cloud Optimization
Adopting a multi-cloud strategy introduces several challenges that organizations must address to optimize their cloud environments effectively. One significant issue is cloud waste, which occurs when resources are left unused or underused, often due to overestimating requirements. According to a survey, 38% of organizations experience more than 30% wastage in their cloud spend. Cloud waste can result from using services longer than needed, making duplicate purchases, over-provisioning instances, and failing to de-provision orphaned resources.
Another challenge is the lack of performance tracking and benchmarking. Without a robust framework for monitoring cloud performance, organizations struggle to optimize costs, maintain business continuity, and ensure service availability. This can lead to provisioning-utilization mismatches, increased costs, performance bottlenecks, downtime, degraded user experience, and security risks.
Organizational alignment is also critical. Collaboration between finance and engineering teams is essential, but these teams often operate in silos, leading to communication gaps and misaligned priorities. This can cause unintentional cost variances and degraded user experiences.
Accurate forecasting is crucial for managing dynamic cloud costs. The fluctuating nature of cloud expenses makes precise prediction challenging. Without continuous and accurate cost forecasting, organizations risk over-provisioning and overspending. Developing an effective forecasting strategy involves analyzing historical data, choosing appropriate forecasting models, and implementing automation to enhance visibility and cost governance.
Lastly, the absence of a dedicated FinOps team can hinder cloud cost optimization. When responsibilities are dispersed among engineers and finance professionals with other core duties, there is often no formal accountability for managing cloud budgets and optimizing resource usage. Establishing a FinOps team can address this issue, focusing on cost analysis, resource performance, provisioning, pricing efficiency, and budgeting.
The Need for Cloud Optimization
Cost management is a significant concern, as tracking cloud spending across multiple providers is challenging. By optimizing cloud infrastructure, companies can address these challenges and achieve substantial savings. Effective cloud optimization can reduce overall cloud spend by up to 50%, freeing up resources for more strategic investments such as innovation and growth. This not only enhances operational efficiency but also allows businesses to redirect funds towards initiatives that drive long-term success. Therefore, adopting a robust cloud optimization strategy is crucial for maximizing the value of cloud investments and maintaining a competitive edge in the market.
The cloud optimization market is experiencing rapid growth as businesses seek to maximize their cloud investments. According to recent industry reports, the global cloud optimization market is expected to reach $20 billion by 2026, driven by the increasing adoption of multi-cloud strategies and the need for efficient cloud cost management. Organizations are looking for solutions that provide comprehensive visibility, control, and optimization capabilities to manage their complex cloud environments effectively.
Concierto: A Holistic View of Your Hybrid Cloud
Concierto provides an unparalleled data-driven view of your entire hybrid cloud environment, including on-premises infrastructure. This solution goes beyond mere analytics, offering insights into anomalies, overspending, and under-utilization, and enabling instant remediation through ready-made automations.
Operational Dashboards
Monitor your cloud and MSP performance through real-time dashboards across AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-prem environments. Track incidents, requests, changes, vulnerabilities, SLA compliance, and more across all environments.
Fin-Ops
Concierto provides cloud spend planning, budget forecasting, controls and alerts, comparative analytics between clouds, and triggers for controlling spend. It offers detailed cloud consumption analytics across cloud platforms AWS, Azure, and GCP along with on-premises environments. Custom policies can be created to combine multiple accounts, with alerts sent via email or incident tickets.
Spend Optimization
Concierto goes beyond simply providing analytics on what happened. With pre-built capabilities for planning, budgeting, and allocations by department at a cloud account level, you can put spend controls in place. Concierto also provides alerts and triggers when thresholds are likely to be breached. When spend anomalies occur, Concierto creates high-priority incidents, which can be remediated using AI-recommended click-through automations.
Projected Billing and Charge-Forward
Track your spend, get estimated cloud spend, forecast spending by account, department, project, etc., and allocate on a forward-looking basis. Concierto also allows generating monthly bills for one or multiple accounts with options for percentage or fixed-price allocations.
What Sets Concierto Apart from Other Observability Platforms
Concierto is unique in the realm of hybrid cloud analytics platforms, offering comprehensive operational, automation, and financial operations (Fin-Ops) analytics across AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-premises environments. Its operational analytics provide role-based views of performance metrics, SLAs, incidents, requests, changes, and priorities, ensuring that every team member has the insights they need to manage their responsibilities effectively. This detailed visibility into various aspects of cloud operations helps organizations maintain high performance and reliability standards across their entire infrastructure.
In addition to operational analytics, Concierto excels in automation analytics. It delivers deep insights into the usage, success and failure rates, execution times, and frequency of automation processes. These insights enable organizations to streamline their operations, enhance efficiency, and reduce manual intervention. By understanding and optimizing automation workflows, businesses can ensure that their cloud environments are running smoothly and effectively, minimizing the risk of errors and downtime.
Financial operations (Fin-Ops) analytics is another area where Concierto stands out. It provides comprehensive multi-cloud usage analytics, on-premises cost monitoring, and comparisons, along with tools for planning, budgeting, and forecasting. Detailed monthly billing and the ability to create and enforce intelligent policies for governance, access, and permissions further enhance financial oversight. The platform also integrates seamlessly with major enterprise monitoring tools such as AppDynamics, Datadog, Dynatrace, and New Relic, as well as ITSM tools like Jira and ServiceNow. Automated incident management, featuring event correlation, noise cancellation, and AI-based recommendations, ensures that incidents are resolved quickly and efficiently, maintaining operational stability and performance.
The Benefits
Concierto provides data-driven views of your entire applications and infrastructure real estate, no matter which cloud or on-prem environment. It allows businesses to plan, budget, and set controls on their AWS, Azure, or GCP cloud spend by account, ensuring zero runaway spending through robust controls and alerts. By optimizing performance and capacity utilization through continuous monitoring and real-time analytics, Concierto’s AI-driven recommendations and ready-made automations help businesses address anomalies quickly and efficiently. Furthermore, Concierto is fully integrated with third-party monitoring, security, performance management, and other tools, eliminating the need for manual efforts and coding, thereby reducing errors and iterations.
Conclusion
In today’s competitive landscape, merely observing your cloud infrastructure is not enough. With Concierto's Maximize solution, businesses can take proactive steps to optimize their hybrid cloud environments, ensuring they run efficiently and cost-effectively. From multi-dimensional analytics to performance optimization and cost management, Maximize offers a complete suite of tools to help businesses make the most of their cloud investments.
By leveraging the advanced features and robust support offered by Concierto, businesses can navigate the complexities of hybrid cloud management with confidence, ensuring they remain agile and competitive in today’s fast-paced digital landscape.
