Tag Archive for: IT

FinOps: The Essential Art of Fine-Tuning Cloud Expenditure for Enterprises

 

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

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Where has the demand been shifted in Technology?

We work with over 150+ vendors and partners, continually in contact with them. Rather than selling the technology, we looked into how they’ve adapted and what they see as the latest trends.

 

Our partner network says COVID-19 has changed their organisation focus, with some hitting their yearly targets within two months – some having their technology consumption go from 1.5m users to 10m within 21 days – others adapting and creating short-term offerings to plug the hole which they anticipate.

 

The COVID-19 pandemic initially frightened shareholders, investors, vendors and solution providers’ plans for 2020 in the cloud technology market. However, soon after, technology priorities shifted as their prospects and customers faced the pandemic’s force of either group to remote and work from home scenarios or suspending operations entirely.

After enduring weeks of pandemic situations and understanding the beginnings of what a recovery will look like, solution providers are starting to recognise the short-term technology demands of the prospects and customers. According to research by The 2112 Group, these are what solution providers say are the top 5 technologies for the remainder of 2020.

5. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR)

Companies understand that their operations will cease if they cannot have access to their data and IT resources.   Nevertheless, business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) services are gaining revived recognition in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Businesses are reevaluating their business continuity plans and resources as they identified gaps in their capabilities during the shift to decreased operations and remote workforces.

 

 

4. Networking

Though basic infrastructure and network may not be the most riveting technology, yet one-quarter (26%) of solution providers claim switching and routing will continue to be an essential product set. Businesses are reevaluating their network capacity demand to account for the shifting use cases as a consequence of the pandemic. Many companies anticipate reconfiguring their networks to support more remote connections and reduced latency for cloud-based applications.

 

 

3. Communications and Collaboration

Before the pandemic, Zoom established itself as one of the popular kids of the cloud-based video conferencing platforms. With Microsoft Teams physically distanced, Zoom with its minimal subscription and free offering sprinted on ahead overnight. Microsoft Teams, Cisco WebEx, and Google Meet observed growth in demand and utilisation. Every video conferencing, collaboration, and unified communications service is witnessing growth as businesses look to empower their new work from home contact centre and aiding the workforce to keep connected during social distancing. As we all look to the recovery period, many think working from home will become the new norm and permanent for many people, shaping communications and collaboration as a red-hot commodity for the foreseeable future.

 

2. Cloud Infrastructure Services

The cloud is earning its keep throughout the pandemic. Each company reluctant around migrating their infrastructure to the cloud – in both hosted or hybrid configurations – discovered promptly through their pandemic encounter the need of having access to data and resources. While the economy took a high in the first quarter as spending came to a sudden halt, cloud service providers witnessed considerable increases in their sales and consumption.

 

 

 

 

1. Security

For the past couple of years, Security technologies are always high on the agenda and demand as the threat of hackers is everywhere, and growing government regulations enforce data protection. The pandemic exposed new problems with IT security: An uneven distribution. As businesses moved to a work from home strategy, they soon realised that their security standards weren’t up to the job. People leaving the office were now using home PCs with consumer operating systems, inadequate security software, and poorly secured WiFi networks. Security technologies – especially managed security services – is witnessing growing demand as business reinforce their data protection measures to account for their distributed workforces.

 

 

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Why move to SD-WAN?

If your company has a presence across multiple locations, the term SD-WAN should have come across your desk.

As companies move away from traditional compute to the Internet and the cloud, the conventional way of building WANs has become outdated. Costs for MPLS have been too expensive, service configuration commonly known for their poor punctuality and lengthy deployments. Companies have had over-compensate on their capacity, or limit performance due to inadequate bandwidth. 

 

SD-WAN acts to address the problem with smart routing for the right application. This is achievable as SD-WAN creates a virtual overlay over the underlying data services, distributing the upper protocol stack from the network. All networks have some independence from the underlying data service. It’s what allows us to run IP across Ethernet as efficiently as we do across MPLS.

 

Benefits of SD-WAN

1) Business Efficiency 

Deployment timescales are drastically reduced with the agile deployment of WAN services, such firewall and bandwidth. This means sites with no IT staff can roll-out services to branches without local IT staff. Companies can also benefit from enhanced agility with the capability to increase and reduce bandwidth based upon demands without the need for lengthy configurations, more often than not with the click of a button.

2) Commercial Rational

SD-WAN delivers firms an added layer of reliability, assuring that internet connectivity (cable, DSL, and Ethernet) is widely accessible and fast to roll-out. This can be achieved at a margin of the cost of a similar MPLS circuit, delivering a secure and reliable WAN service which is inexpensive and within constrained budgets.

3) Optimal Cloud Architecture

SD‐WAN augments networks to effortlessly and efficiently connect to cloud-based applications. It eradicates the backhaul penalties of conventional MPLS networks providing secure, low latency, high packet delivery (FEC), high‐performance pathways to the cloud. Implementing SD-WAN will increase the end-user experience with cloud and SaaS-based applications. 

4) Effortless Management and Adoption

Speed is the principal advantage of SD‐WAN, it makes implementing WAN services quick and uncomplicated. SD‐WAN solutions are incomplex to roll-out and offer traffic monitoring and automated setup, making them simple to handle.

5) Move to Hybrid WAN

The common myth is if businesses have already invested into MPLS for branch offices, it’s not necessary to roll-out SD-WAN. But, the advantages of operating a hybrid network potentially is something to have you rethinking your strategy. Businesses can seamlessly deploy SD‐WAN solutions without modifying the current MPLS network. Companies can migrate traffic increases toward a more inexpensive Internet bandwidth.

It’s common knowledge that Cloud technology transformed the industry for many organisations, the ability to deploy almost instantly, adaptability and customisation at your fingertips at an economical price; SD-WAN is no different. SD-WAN is shifting the network paradigm to deliver enterprises what they need and when for the ability to take full advantage of modern computing. The actuality is that companies without SD-WAN are not performing at their optimal level. It’s like only using 30% of your brain; imagine what can be accomplished if you utilise the other 70%. 

6) How to execute that shift from 30% to 100%

Our team of SD-WAN experts are experienced from delivering all kinds of solutions from a small store with multiple national stores, moving away from broadband and the pains associated with changes for their busy season such as Christmas that take up to 2 weeks. Or a global asset management firm where it was imperative to have that split second advantage over their financial competitors – Get in touch for a complimentary SD-WAN advisory session!

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