The cloud’s benefits are undeniable, and its on-demand consumption model promises cost savings – letting you pay only for what you use. Yet when organizations move to the cloud, they sometimes find costs spiraling out of control. And they often lack visibility into who is buying what or using which services, making it difficult to analyze costs or map usage to business value.
Cloud pricing can be incredibly complex and difficult to understand. Adding to the thousands of SKUs is the extreme granularity in billing, constant changes in offerings and pricing models, fluctuating variable prices, and a lack of standardization in cloud billing. These conditions make it challenging for solution providers and their customers to understand costs and can add up to tens of thousands – even millions – of dollars every year in extra spending.
IDC predicts increased investment in public cloud cost management through 2022 as enterprises seek to cut cloud waste by 50%.
Digital transformation, remote work, and the pandemic have all contributed to accelerated cloud adoption. Hitachi Cloud FinOps Services helps companies address the cost side of the cloud equation so they can find the right balance between cost, agility, quality, and value-add to the business.
Where to Begin
Take a three-step approach to driving cloud cost optimization and innovation:
1. Perform an as-is analysis to assess your current IT environment and cloud ecosystem.
2. Set goals and define strategies for cost optimization with KPIs and governance rules that will keep you on track.
3. Adopt a continuous, iterative cost avoidance/cost reduction model to constantly monitor and adjust your overall consumption of cloud services based on business need.
Cloud Cost Optimization with FinOps
Hitachi Cloud FinOps Services are designed to support each organization’s unique cloud environment, whether private cloud, multicloud, hybrid cloud, or distributed cloud. These managed services can include anything from automated cloud consumption and cost monitoring to establishing cloud governance and usage controls.
In fact, customers report 30% average savings with Hitachi Cloud FinOps Services.
Taking the complexity out of controlling cloud costs, Hitachi Cloud FinOps Services provide real-time support for fast, data-driven decisions to meet business goals. They can map spending data to the business, set tag strategies to organize costs, allocate shared costs equitably, and recommend cost take-outs from existing cloud platforms. They can also help define budgets and forecasts; establish score carding, benchmarking, trend and variance analysis; and set up automated reports, real-time dashboards, and alerts for tracking.
The Bottom Line
FinOps guiding principles are quickly becoming an industry-wide practice to help enterprises understand and control cloud spending. Hitachi Vantara leverages its expertise in consulting services, cloud acceleration, flexible infrastructure choices, and best practices to help solution providers and their customers adopt a cloud cost management approach that brings together financial, technical, and business functions to create a cost-conscious culture for cloud optimization.
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