Tag Archive for: finops

 

In the era of multi-cloud adoption, the stakes have never been higher when it comes to managing and aligning your cloud expenditures.

Embracing cloud services is a breeze, but mastering cloud spending can be problematic for enterprises dedicated to extracting maximum value from their tech investments.

According to Gartner’s latest forecast, global spending on public cloud services is set to skyrocket by 20.7% in 2023, reaching a staggering $591.8 billion. Meanwhile, Foundry’s Cloud Computing Study for 2023 reveals that while reducing total cost of ownership ranks among the top priorities for cloud computing initiatives, reigning in cloud costs is the ultimate hurdle that can either accelerate or derail cloud adoption.

One of Excelien’s clients points out, “The cloud offers unparalleled potential for growth, but costs can quickly spiral out of control.”

Navigating Uncharted Cloud Expenses

Worries about soaring cloud and distributed computing costs often leave organisations with two crucial strategies for cost containment:

  1. Optimise computing power to minimise expenses while achieving business goals.
  2. Turn off cloud resources swiftly to save precious budgets.

Excelien experts say, “In the pursuit of speed and customer onboarding, cost efficiency can sometimes take a backseat. Attempting to optimise costs after the fact while simultaneously managing operations and growth can become an uphill battle.”

Unleashing cost-efficiency and unleashing productivity hinges on the ability to meticulously track cloud resource usage, workload execution, and the reasonable deployment of available CPUs.

These factors are central to the evolving realm of FinOps, a fusion of financial wisdom and DevOps principles. According to the FinOps Foundation’s Technical Advisory Council, FinOps empowers organisations to bring financial accountability to cloud spending by fostering collaboration among engineering, finance, tech, and business teams for data-driven spending decisions.

With access to financial insights, organisations can make real-time decisions to optimise costs. Engineers can now evaluate the financial implications of feature development and product changes, aligning them with cost efficiency, just as they would fine-tune for performance or uptime.

Bridging the Gap Between Cost and Performance

“To act upon cloud financial data effectively, it’s essential to attribute costs to the teams responsible for spending. These teams are best positioned to leverage the cloud’s elasticity.” – Excelien FinOps.

While all cloud providers offer some level of cost reporting, the complexity of managing multiple cloud environments can make it challenging to consolidate and align cost and performance insights across an enterprise. With advanced analytics, organisations can achieve superior results in less time, extracting maximum value from their cloud investments.

Can you run analytics in the cloud? Absolutely. But will it deliver the performance you need? For many, that’s the million-dollar question…”

Of course, we can help in all the above with a whole host of tools – Automated reports on where cost savings are possible, management of payment methods to ensure you’re on the most cost-effective instance possible, management of RIs to ensure you’re not overprovisioned, rightsizing of containers.

Speak to Excelien, see how a 2-week PoC can deliver you a RoI report and show precisely what savings are possible.

Schedule a meeting with Excelien to discuss FinOps

Banks are investing in cloud technology as a significant priority. According to a recent survey by American Banker, over 40% of executives consider cloud technology among their top five spending priorities. Additionally, 80% of respondents expect to migrate at least 20% of their computing infrastructure to the cloud by 2023.

This shift towards cloud adoption is appropriate due to the advantages it offers banks, such as scalable resources based on usage and the ability to avoid unnecessary onsite hardware purchases to meet increasing resource demands. However, banks currently face three major challenges in managing cloud effectively. 

The first challenge is the need for more visibility, as they need to understand their cloud usage, deployment details, and locations to make the most of it. Increased cloud spending can lead to cloud sprawl and loss of control.

The second challenge is agility, which allows banks to act quickly based on information. Legacy solutions can hinder this advantage, making it crucial for banks to identify areas they need to modernise to enhance their agility.

The third challenge is managing cloud spending efficiently. While the cloud provides cost-effective solutions, expenses can escalate beyond control without proper oversight.

To address these challenges and stay competitive, banks can adopt a CloudOps approach, emphasising visibility, automation, and continuous optimisation in the cloud. This approach aligns business objectives with cloud operations, providing banks with a complete understanding of their cloud-based services, identifying areas for improvement and optimising operations.

Intelligent automation can enhance flexibility, allowing banks to adapt to changing conditions swiftly. Moreover, optimisation based on the principles of continuous integration and continuous delivery from DevOps can help banks save money.

Nevertheless, the elastic nature of the cloud presents challenges in managing resources effectively. Many banks may find themselves surprised by their monthly cloud spending and its rapid growth without a clear strategy to control it. However, with the right approach and solutions, banks can optimise their cloud operations, ensuring efficient resource utilisation and cost control.

How Excelien Can Help Financial Services

Of course, it’s one thing to talk about CloudOps for banks; it’s another to implement it at scale.

Excelien can help. we can help banks discover what they have in the cloud and what they can do to optimise these resources. Companies can also use these tools to significantly reduce their computing costs.

Excelien also can help banks by finding unused resources in current cloud infrastructure and then offloading those resources to other consumers. In other words, Excelien allows banks to effectively sublease some of their excess cloud resources to other businesses, allowing them to eliminate cloud sprawl and reduce costs without compromising performance.

Banks need the cloud to stay current, connect with fintech firms and effectively address emerging market challenges. But just having the cloud isn’t enough. Banks need to boost visibility, improve flexibility and control costs to make the most of cloud deployments.

Contact the team at hello@excelien.com or book an appointment with our specialists.

 

The debate over cloud costs has intensified as cloud platforms have become the primary focus for most IT deployments. Despite the significant growth in cloud adoption over the last decade, a considerable amount of technology remains non-cloud or on-premises.

Initially, it was believed that public cloud services would reduce the cost per bit of compute and storage resources and provide more account-friendly operating costs. However, while cloud costs can be classified as operating costs, they are still a significant expense. As a result, many companies are discovering that cloud resources are less cost-effective than their on-premises counterparts.

Nonetheless, cloud adoption has successfully accelerated the pace businesses operate and enable the rapid deployment of new services and digital products.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the cloud’s potential as a remote work and retail delivery solution. Additionally, cloud technology provides increased flexibility in purchasing compute and storage resources, allowing companies to procure more IT resources to support R&D, ongoing product development, and internal digital transformation initiatives.

 

“There is a newfound emphasis on the visibility of cloud costs”

Recent surveys and discussions with professionals have revealed that cost has become a new priority for cloud adoption. Organisations are interested in comparing the costs of cloud hosting with on-premises resources.

To quote Peter Drucker, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” The first step to understanding costs is to track and analyse them. Easier said than done. Many cloud services are still purchased in ad-hoc ways or by business lines operating in the “shadow IT” model. CEOs and CFOs are looking to put an end to this.

Cloud Cost Management (CCM) and Financial Operations (FinOps) tools have emerged to address this need for cost visibility. These tools offer sophisticated methods for measuring and managing cloud costs, including evaluating the impact on networking and security adjacencies. Additionally, managers would like to assign costs to specific business units for accountability purposes.

Cloud management companies like Flexera, Apptio, and Virtana are developing CCM and FinOps tools. CCM provides intelligent bill analysis across AWS, Azure, and GCP and alerts on unexpected changes that drive cloud spending, offering actionable saving recommendations. Flexera’s FinOps module integrates into the Flexera One platform, part of a comprehensive IT asset management strategy. Apptio focuses on understanding the operating costs in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and commitments to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) implementations. Virtana’s CCM offers ongoing cloud cost optimisation, uniquely emphasising balancing performance, risk, and cost.

While platform tools such as IBM’s Turbonomics and VMware’s CloudHealth provide some visibility into usage as it happens, they fall short of providing cost remediation information useful for finance and engineering teams to have cost-reduction conversations.

Emerging solutions focus on arbitrage between cloud offerings, and Kubernetes compute capabilities to reduce compute costs. CAST AI is a promising startup that helps organisations understand Kubernetes costs across various areas, including cost monitoring, security management, autoscaling, rightsizing, and spot instance automation. CAST AI has a unique business model in which it charges customers based on a percentage of the amount of money saved on compute costs.

 

“It’s not just cloud services, networking too”

 

The networking industry has recognised the potential to enhance the comprehension of cloud costs. Cloud networking companies like Aviatrix and Prosimo understand that networking is a critical enabler of the cloud. It can be leveraged to provide better visibility and management of cloud service access since cloud services are connected through networks.

Aviatrix’s CostIQ uses distributed telemetry to measure shared cloud network usage and assigns the results to the appropriate cost centres. Prosimo’s Full Stack Cloud Transit platform provides insights into application requirements and performance, which can be used to optimise cloud networking experiences and costs. Both companies are also working on other areas to maximise cloud expenses. We can expect new products from them soon.

Today, with many companies relying on a more intricate cloud operating structure that involves more cloud data, more cloud providers, improved cloud data management, and better cloud security, the financial consequences of daily decisions can significantly impact a company’s cloud bill and overall operating budget.