Our CXO Roundtable conducted on 30 Jan in Bengaluru offered a unique opportunity to discover innovative IT & business strategies for optimizing cloud infrastructure and business performance. Attendees learned how to right-size resources, leverage spot and reserved instances, and automate scaling processes to enhance cloud efficiency.

What was covered:

• Fuelling Growth with Scalable Cloud Technology: How scalable cloud platforms can enhance operational efficiency and agility, helping businesses stay competitive.
• Mastering FinOps for Cost Optimization: Strategies that can reduce cloud spending by up to 30% while maintaining optimal performance, maximizing ROI.
• Enhancing Data Security and Compliance: Robust cloud solutions to safeguard data and meet compliance requirements, a critical consideration for organizations.
• Driving Customer-Centric Innovation: How modernizing legacy systems can improve customer experiences and foster loyalty through tailored solutions.
• Harnessing AI for Business Transformation: The role of AI streamlined operations and informed decision-making in unlocking innovation and growth opportunities.

The post CXO Roundtable Dinner & Cloud Transformation Summit appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

Based on inputs from Cloud Kinetics FinOps team  

Operating in the cloud promises a boost to agility, innovation, time to market and more. But if you don’t have the centralized coordination and collaborative approach that FinOps brings, you could be wasting millions in cloud spends every year!

For many organizations, investments in cloud spend run into the billions every year as they tap into the agility, reliability, and flexibility that the cloud offers. With the sudden increase in cloud investment has come the problem of excessive and wasteful spending. If your organization is on the verge of implementing FinOps but you’re unsure of what it entails or have cloud spending related concerns, answers to these top 5 most common questions on cloud costs should clear things up.

Over 30% of cloud spend is reported to be wasted every year. This number is projected to hit $30 billion by the end of the year.

Implementing FinOps – cloud financial management practices designed to maximize business value – is the most effective way for organizations to gain better control on cloud spend, avoid waste and keep projects running efficiently without compromising on end results. Here are some of the most common questions and concerns our customers, stakeholders and decision-makers have before embarking on a FinOps journey.

Our in-house experts at Cloud Kinetics, led by FinOps Managed Services Director Aubrey Bent, provide insight and pointers based on their extensive experience working with a global client base.

1. What is the best way to kickstart FinOps practices in my organization?

When it comes to FinOps, one step at a time works better than a big-bang approach. Implement the approach in small incremental steps, allowing the organization to fully understand and slowly settle into the new approach. Here’s a roadmap:

• Get senior stakeholder management support and sponsorship.
  Identify pain points like cloud costs, cost overruns or lack of cost visibility and define the goals right from the team composition to the operating model and milestones for the first phase. For instance, you may need to make decisions on things like whether a FinOps centre of excellence team is being set up.
• Create a FinOps roadmap/plan to define the future state.
  This should include an operating model to clearly define what the FinOps team will be doing. A Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed (RACI) model will have to be created explaining what each person’s roles and responsibilities are and identify KPIs to measure the FinOps function and performance of business and application teams.
• Prepare an engagement plan.
  This will help show how you will engage and collaborate with your finance, business, engineering and procurement teams.
• Create an ongoing review plan.
  After about 3-6 months, gradually move onto the next phase where you can implement your KPIs, do some more dashboards for creating useful cost optimization reports, and bring automation in as well. The system will evolve over time and you will get better results.

2. How important is training to FinOps success?

Training and education is paramount to the successful implementation of FinOps. It’s also where the entire exercise can fail.
Get internal teams – such as the business and app teams – together. Conduct these 4 training activities on an ongoing basis.

• Kickoff meeting
• Brownbag sessions to educate teams on the FinOps Framework and tooling
• Implementation of recommended actions, ensuring teams are doing these regularly to achieve cost savings.
• Monthly or quarterly scorecards to measure performance and optimization every month.

Repeat these actions month on month till it becomes part of the team’s DNA – if they don’t do it on a regular basis, FinOps cannot be successful.

3. How do we effectively measure FinOps results – any metrics to look at?

• You can define several measurable parameters. For instance, Reserved Instance or Savings Plan Coverage must be >80% every month. Another metric could be that after 30 days of idle instance, you stop or decommission your instance.
• You could track accountability and enablement with a metric like Cloud Enablement %, the number of business leaders trained and certified / the total number of business leaders in the organization as a percentage.
• The Cost Optimization Realized Savings % measures the ratio of total cloud services optimized to total cloud services optimizable. This brings attention to areas for potential cost savings – pricing optimizations like Committed Use Discounts as well as resource optimizations of wasteful resources that haven’t brought/added any business value. The latter could be from over-sized databases, idle instances, etc.
• Annual Forecast Accuracy % is another useful metric that looks at the ratio of actual annual cloud spend vs the forecast cloud spend per annum. The number stabilizes as the gap between actual and forecast narrows, allowing the business to plan better and avoid any unexpected spikes in spends.

4. What are some typical challenges businesses face when managing cloud spend, and what are some best practices to address them?

FinOps to manage cloud spending might sound simple, but there can be some challenges.

The hardest one is to change the ways of working within an organization especially if someone has come from an on-premises world and is also new to cloud. It needs a mindset shift.

Surveys show that 30% of the challenge is getting the DevOps team to do the actions needed to enable FinOps. DevOps teams tend to already be very busy doing development and project work which is their priority and key focus.

Additionally, FinOps can become complex because of the intrinsic need for collaboration and getting the finance team and the procurement teams involved isn’t always straightforward.

The best way to overcome these issues is to educate them and train them on the benefits and value from FinOps, so that all the teams are ready to come on your journey. FinOps is relatively new to the cloud industry and many people do not know about it, so training sessions and brownbag sessions help build cadence with them and smoothen the process.

The next thing is to try and automate these actions as much as possible so that less manual effort is required from them.

5. What are some tools or services that Cloud Kinetics offers that can help businesses better manage their cloud spend?

Cloud Kinetics has best-in-class partnerships with multiple providers/tools in the field, including Apptio and Spot by NetApp. We have extensively utilized Cloudability by Apptio for FinOps in our engagements with customers as we have found that it meets most of our customers requirements – from easy-to-use dashboards and a benchmarking scorecard to insights into right sizing and unused resources.

Cloudability has APIs allowing one to integrate with DataDog, PagerDuty, ServiceNow etc. For example, if you have a workflow or want to put your billing into one central location like ServiceNow it can integrate as well. This tool can store the data for 1-2 years, allowing for forecasting, right sizing recommendations, unlike native tooling which has a limited window for storage of billing data.

That said, at Cloud Kinetics we ensure we always choose the best-fit solutions and tools for your organization based on your requirements and goals.

You can also download the FinOps 101 Handbook HERE

The post Save Money In The Cloud <br>With FinOps: Your Top 5 <br>Cloud Cost Qs Answered appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

We were thrilled to see the fantastic turnout, engaging discussions and thought-provoking questions that emerged during the session.

Panelists

Key takeaways from the webinar

🔑 Alignment Matters: The collaboration between finance and engineering teams is critical in managing cloud costs effectively. When these teams work hand-in-hand, it drives better financial visibility and accountability.

📊 Data-Driven Decisions: Leveraging data and analytics is essential to making informed decisions about cloud spend. We discussed the importance of tracking and analyzing usage patterns to optimize costs.

💡 Cloud Optimization Strategies: We explored various strategies and best practices for optimizing cloud costs, including rightsizing, reserved instances, and spot instances.

🤝 Effective Communication: Establishing clear communication channels and a common understanding of cloud cost management goals is crucial for success. Bridging the gap between these two teams can lead to cost savings and improved efficiency.

Our heartfelt thanks to our guest speakers and everyone who participated in the webinar. Your active engagement and insightful questions made this event a resounding success!

Finops 101 webinar: Catch the action here

Get in touch with us for a complimentary 30-minute connect with Aubrey Bent to help support your FinOps journey.

The post FinOps 101: Build Partnership Between Finance & Engineering Teams On Cloud Cost Optimization appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

The post How A Bank Saw 32% Cloud Cost Reduction In 6 Months With FinOps appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

The post $2M+ Cost Savings From FinOps For A Financial Organization appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

Challenges of managing cloud expenditure

Enterprise spending on public cloud has been growing quickly and significantly. According to recent surveys, companies plan to spend 24% more on public cloud in coming years as compared to past years. Ironically, while one of the main benefits of moving to cloud is cost savings, it can quickly spiral out of control and become a significant challenge for your organization. Here’s what this boils down to:

• One of the key challenges cited by enterprises is understanding the cost implications of licensed software running in the cloud. Optimizing existing cloud usage for cost savings will be a top priority for IT teams in coming years.
• Like any IT service, public cloud can involve unexpected charges. It can be noted that most of the cloud teams are not doing all they can do to optimize their cloud expenditure. Only a limited number of companies have implemented automated systems to manage the cloud expenditure.
• Cost unpredictability has become one of the main pain points for cloud management. A contributing factor to this is the difficulty organizations have in tracking and forecasting cloud usage. A report found that unpredictable budget costs was one of the biggest cloud management pain points for 37% of respondents, while 30% had difficulty with lack of transparency and visibility.
• The flexibility to scale up and down on demand has become a double-edged sword. On one hand, it is beneficial as companies can engage infrastructure only when required and save cost when not in use. On the other hand, if the demand is not properly estimated, it can result in over-estimation and underutilization of resources.

No wonder cloud cost management and cloud governance have emerged as top concerns for enterprise customers!

6 ways to manage cloud expenditure

Cloud cost management is not a fix-and-forget process. It is a meticulous and continuous activity that needs to be undertaken from the beginning. Here are a few ways you can immediately start saving money on your cloud infrastructure costs.

1. Identify wastage

The first step to reducing cloud expenditure is to uncover inefficient use of cloud resources. You will need to address key areas that account for the majority of wasted cloud spend and budget overruns. If you find resources which are under-utilized, quickly find ways to either use them or de-implement them.

2. Right-size your instances

Have a clear understanding about the resource utilization and performance requirements before you finalize the sizing for your instances. Oversized instances are one of the main culprits for overspending on cloud resources. Around 40% of instances are sized larger than necessary and could easily be scaled down without impacting application performance.

3. Set up clear budgeting and governance policies

Once your requirements are set, ensure that you have clear policies regarding budget and governance. Set budget caps aligned with your growth projections at organizational unit and account levels which will prevent internal IT teams from overspending. It is also advisable to have guidelines in place so that any usage goes through a proper approval process to avoid unnecessary spending.

4. Provide visibility

Teams should have a clear visibility into what they are spending. Identify which resources are being used and who owns it. Tagging resources with user ownership will allow the teams to track usage effectively and shut down unutilized cloud resources.

5. Clear unused storage

Evaluate what you are storing on the cloud. As Virtual Machines are shut down, the attached storage can sometimes be left running, which contributes to unnecessary spending. It is better to delete unused storage. Furthermore, shutting down instances during nights and weekends can also help save about 70% of runtime costs. Define which environments need 24×7 availability, and set schedules for the rest.

6. Select cloud region wisely

Review the regions in which your services are running. Cloud providers offer regions to help customers store resources closer to where they need to be. The cost of services per region can vary by as much as 60%. Ensure that the need of running services in a given region balances the costs involved.

The Bottomline

Exceeding set budgets for cloud is a common yet avoidable problem for most organizations. If time and resources are roadblocks you face while managing cloud costs, look to using a cloud management platform. You could also partner with a cloud service provider who can optimize, control, and manage your cloud spending for you.  Whatever path you choose, committing to a culture of cost management and optimization will be a game changer for your organization and your business.

The post Cloud Cost Management: 6 Steps <br>To Manage & Reduce Your Cloud Expenditure appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

The post Balancing Cloud Costs & Efficiency: Saving $2.4M+ For A Bank With FinOps appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

According to a recent report, organizations with a sound Finops culture stand to save 30% on their cloud spending. In this masterclass webinar, Aubrey Bent, Cloud Kinetics FinOps Practice Lead, with 20+ years of IT experience & 8+ years focussed on Cloud Financial Management, shared practical insights & best practices on managing your cloud spend while optimizing time and resources.

Session highlights included:

• Finops 101: Why your organization needs FinOps
• The FinOps framework
• Use cases & user stories
• Discovery steps to get started

The session was followed by Q&A and opportunities to connect one on one.

The post Master The Art Of Cloud Financial Management appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

According to a recent survey conducted by the FinOps Foundation, organizations that have adopted a FinOps culture stand to save 30% on their cloud spending.

A sound FinOps culture translates to:

• Better visibility into cloud spending
• Optimization of resources
• Improved collaboration between finance, engineering, and operations teams
• Faster time to market and increased innovation

In this exclusive panel discussion, participants explored this further and learned about managing cloud spend, while optimizing time and resources.

Panelists included:

• Aubrey Bent, FinOps Practice Lead at Cloud Kinetics, with 20+ years of IT and focused Cloud Financial Management experience
• Brian Lim, Industry Technical Specialist at Intel, with expertise in optimizing and protecting critical applications and data storage on Cloud

The discussion was followed by Q&A and opportunities to connect one on one.

For many participants, it proved the perfect opportunity to get invaluable insights from industry experts and jumpstart their FinOps journey. Stay tuned for more such webinars!

The post Webinar- FinOps 101: Master The Art Of Cloud Financial Management appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.