Missed our latest webinar on FinOps for MSPs? We’ve got you covered! This blog post will cover what the FinOps experts discussed and the main things to remember. FinOps are revolutionizing MSP operations by adding a data-driven approach to cost management. This method helps MSPs optimize their cloud usage, provide white-glove support to customers, and give visibility on their expenses. Why it matters:  Competition among MSPs is fierce as businesses aim to maximize the value of their IT investments. You must prove your worth to prospects and customers to stand out from other providers.  Enabling FinOps can be a highly effective strategy to distinguish your cloud reseller business, and we’ll show you why. In this webinar recap, we’ll highlight: How MSPs can add value with FinOps services FinOps success from an MSP perspective  Q&A  Not much of a reader? Watch it on demand!   Empowering MSPs with FinOps Services Our presenter, Melissa Abecasis, has been there. As a former worker of an MSP, she's dealt with various FinOps issues, making her an expert solution finder. Below are some examples of FinOps challenges and specific tactics to resolve them.    Roadblock: Many recruits needed a FinOps background. This means more time needs to be devoted to educating them. MSPs need experienced consultants and need them fast. Training slows down operations on both the vendor and customer sides. Customer satisfaction is at risk when services are prolonged.  Solution: Find a tool that expedites the learning curve for FinOps engineers. A platform that can give real-time guidance and explanations to customers. Psssst… Anodot’s Recommendations feature can help with this!    Roadblock: Unsatisfied customers are getting repetitive recommendations from their reps. MSPs need to show their insights are relevant. The value of service decreases for the customer. Shaken trust in vendor’s credibility.  Solution: A customizable feature that can automate reminders so the information given is timely and accurate. BTW: Anodot's Exclude feature lets you add notes and tweak the timing to bring up specific points again when they make the most sense to the customer.   Roadblock: Cloud costs are increasing for the customer.  The customer seeks validation of the value offered by the MSP. The customer wonders if having a FinOps team is worth the investment. There is no evidence to support an ROI for this service. Solution: Demonstrate to your customers that your work saves money by providing insights that your services are still cost-effective even if cloud costs are going up (FYI: Anodot has a tool that automatically tracks actions, so your MSP teams don’t have to do it manually).    Watch Melissa's full presentation in the on-demand webinar.     Achieving Financial Operations Success from an MSP Perspective Validation is vital when proving that FinOps adds value to cloud-based environments. That’s why first-hand experience with FinOps significantly increases its credibility.  Sergio Gonzaga, Solutions Architecture Lead at CloudZone, tells about his FinOps journey with his MSP company. Here are some essential points he covered:   Highlight 1:  Flexible billing and custom views can help MSP customers understand if the services they are utilizing (or not) are within budget.  Custom views help see spending across departments and business units Tech strategy can be implemented based on the insights. A better comprehension of cost variations across different tiers or sizes for the same services.   Highlight 2: Tracking cost progress is vital to understand cost impacts during production.  Relevant dimensions can ensure that MSP spending is reasonable.  Tailored services for launching a custom namespace can be adjusted as needed. Monitoring cost per app, component, or by the team can give better support to customers with ML ops.    Highlight 3: Accuracy is critical when providing software-as-a-service subscriptions. Context support in a multi-tenant solution is crucial.  The location of customers in different regions can incur high costs. With Anodot's insights, informed decisions can be made and support overall business decisions.   You can watch Sergio’s entire session by viewing the on-demand webinar.   FinOps for MSPs: Q&A  Our attendees had some outstanding questions during our webinar. Here are a few of the top questions they had: What’s Anodot's level of support for MSPs regarding tool learning? Melissa: Our customer success team is included for all customers, and we offer one-on-one training and training programs to ensure you understand and get value from the tool. We are developing a FinOps training program to support your new employees using the tool with a cloud background. Our support person is closely connected with customer success and R&D teams to ensure smooth and swift operations. Does Anodot have a way to double-check the margins from their reporting?  Melissa: Yes, we provide options to break down margins when moving from partner to customer. There are two ways to do this.  First, by clicking on the "I" icon in the billing history, you can see a breakdown of all line items, how the margin was calculated, where it was purchased, which account received it, and how much they received that did not belong to them.  Second, the cost usage explorer breaks down costs and allows you to move from partner to customer for specific services down to the resource level. Finally, you can contact us through email, Slack, or phone to fully understand where the margin comes from. How well can Anodot capture SaaS service costs from AWS, Azure, and GCP? Melissa: This year, we will introduce specific SaaS cost support and provide details at a later date. We are committed to applying FinOps to cost areas, including SaaS. With business mapping, we can see a split of managed services in AWS versus non-managed services. This helps us compare which costs more and decide on the architecture.   Final thoughts  MSPs can reap the rewards of a FinOps-oriented framework. It's a great way to save on cloud costs, up customer ROI, and ensure you deliver value to your end users.  Wanna learn more?  Grab our FinOps guide for MSPs FYI: Anodot’s cloud cost management solution can help align MSP cloud costs with key business dimensions. Let’s talk!

The public cloud can deliver significant business value across infrastructure cost savings, team productivity, service elasticity, and DevOps agility. Yet, up to 70% of organizations regularly overspend in the cloud, minimizing the gap between cloud costs and the revenue cloud investments can drive. Cloud cost management, or the practice of FinOps, is targeted at helping businesses maximize the return on their investments in cloud technologies and services by helping engineering, finance, technology and business teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions.  A successful cloud cost management strategy will use cost management tools (also known as FinOps tools) to manage cloud costs, and continuously optimize cloud spend to increase cloud efficiency. These include tools offered by the major public cloud service providers — AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.  Anodot has developed a comprehensive white paper exploring the capabilities and limitations of each and how third-party solutions like Anodot can help drive FinOps success. What are FinOps Tools?   A FinOps tool is a cloud provider or third party software that helps you improve your cloud spend. This includes cloud cost management tools, which provide real-time data on cloud usage, giving you a clear look into areas of inefficiency and providing recommendations to optimize spend.  Key Functions and Features of FinOps Tools   A good FinOps tool will help you collect data on how your company uses the cloud, analyze that data, and provide recommendations on how to improve your spending. The information is packaged in such a way so that it can be shared with anyone from shareholders to those uninvolved with the nitty-gritty of the cloud, making it easy for you to break down where you need to cut or add, and why.  Other FinOps features include:  Improved cloud spend transparency. Benchmarking for cloud spend. Bettered cloud spend accountability.  Key AWS FinOps Tools   Amazon Web Services (AWS), the largest public cloud service provider, devotes one-sixth of their Well-Architected Framework to avoiding unnecessary costs. The Well-Architected Cost Optimization Pillar focuses on operationalizing using a range of discrete AWS-native tools and offers little insight for businesses with modern multi-cloud strategies.  AWS offers the most extensive suite of cost management and billing tools, including: AWS Cost Explorer  AWS Cost Explorer is a tool that enables you to view and analyze your costs and usage using the main graph, the Cost Explorer cost and usage reports, or the Cost Explorer RI reports. View historical data for the last 12 months, forecast your spending for the next 12 months, and get recommendations for which RIs to purchase.  Using Cost Explorer, you can identify areas that need further investigation and see trends that can help you better understand your costs. The Cost Explorer also provides preconfigured views that provide an overview of your cost trends and allow you to customize them. AWS Cost and Usage Report + Cloud Intelligence Dashboards The Cost and Usage Report, or CUR, is the foundation for AWS (and all third-party) cost management capabilities, and provides the most comprehensive set of usage and cost data available, including additional metadata about AWS services, pricing, Reserved Instances, and Savings Plans. The Cloud Intelligence Dashboards are a collection of Amazon QuickSight dashboards that are based on the CUR reports. They offer powerful visuals, in-depth insights, and intuitive querying without having to build complex solutions or share your cost data with third-party companies.  The cloud intelligence dashboards are built on native AWS services and take anywhere from 1-2 hrs to install and onboard per dashboard. Dashboards come in three main forms: Cost and Usage Report Dashboards Compute Optimizer Dashboard Trusted Advisor Organizational Dashboard AWS Budgets, AWS Budget Actions and AWS Cost Anomaly Detection AWS Budgets — establish and enforce budgets for certain AWS services, and send messages or emails through the Simple Notification Service (SNS) when you reach or exceed your budget. Budgets allows you to specify an overall cost budget or relate the budget to certain data points, including data usage or the number of instances. The dashboard shows views similar to Cost Explorer, showing the use of services against budgets. AWS Budget Actions — configure actions that will be applied automatically or via a workflow approval process once a budget target has been exceeded. There are three action types: Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, Service Control policies (SCPs), or target running instances (EC2 or RDS). Actions can be configured for actual (after they’ve occurred) or for forecasted (before they occur) budgeted amounts. AWS Cost Anomaly Detection — develop your own contextualized monitor and receive notifications of any anomalous spending, through a series of simple steps. When you have set up your alert and monitor preference, AWS can provide you with daily or weekly alerts via email or SMS. These include summary and individual alerts. You can monitor and carry out your own anomaly analysis using AWS Cost Explorer. [CTA id="89a76a81-7f5c-479e-bca6-66d32f9e02bb"][/CTA] Key Microsoft Azure FinOps Tools   Microsoft Azure Cost Management is a set of FinOps tools that enable you to analyze, manage, and optimize your Azure costs that is offered at no additional cost. Unlike AWS, which often ignores other cloud providers, Microsoft also offers paid cost management for other clouds, namely Cost Management for AWS, which is charged at 1% of the total AWS-managed spend.  Microsoft Azure Cost Management is a more limited suite of tools when compared to AWS and consists of the following features: Azure Cost Analysis Azure Cost Analysis lets you explore and analyze your organizational costs. It shows you the cost, forecast, budget (if used) and provides dynamic pivot charts breaking down the total cost by common attributes such as service name, location, or account name.  Azure Cost Alerts Azure Cost Alerts help you monitor your Azure usage and spending with cost alerts. When your consumption (budget or usage) reaches a predefined threshold, alerts are generated by Cost Management. There are three main types of cost alerts: budget alerts, credit alerts, and department spending quota alerts.  Azure Budgets Azure Budgets help you proactively manage costs by setting thresholds and inform others about their spending using alerts. Budgets are created using the Azure portal or the Azure Consumption API. Budget alerts support both cost-based and usage-based budgets. In the Azure portal, budgets are defined by cost. Using the Azure Consumption API, budgets are defined by cost or by consumption usage.  Azure Advisor Recommendations Cost Management works with Azure Advisor to help you optimize and improve efficiency by identifying idle and underutilized resources. Advisor makes recommendations for: buying reservations; resizing or terminating underutilized VMs; deleting unused network resources such as public ip addresses and express route circuits; and provisioning optimal cosmos DB request units.  Key Google Cloud FinOps Tools   Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is one of the most used cloud platforms on the globe. Google offers a variety of cost management tools and 24/7 billing support at no additional cost for Google Cloud customers. Like other public cloud providers, you will be charged for using Google Cloud services such as BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Cloud Functions, and Cloud Storage. Google Cloud Cost Management offers even fewer features than Microsoft Azure Cost Management, with only three features: Google Cloud Billing Reports Google Cloud Billing reports give you an at-a-glance and user-configurable views of your cost history, current cost trends, and forecasted costs in the Google Cloud console. Several different reports are available for your billing data analysis needs. Google Cloud Billing Budgets Google Billing Budgets trigger alerts to inform you of how your usage costs are trending over time. Budget alert emails are notifications only and do not automatically prevent the use or billing of your services when the budget amount or threshold rules are met or exceeded. Google Cloud Recommender Google Cloud Recommender is a service that provides recommendations and insights for using resources on Google Cloud. These recommendations and insights are per-product or per-service, and are generated based on heuristic methods, machine learning, and current resource usage.  On an ongoing basis, Recommender analyzes current usage of your Cloud resources for available recommenders and insight types and provides recommendations and insights designed to optimize usage for performance, security, cost, or manageability. How To Choose The Right FinOps Tool For Your Needs   When considering the best FinOps tool for your organization, you'll want to keep the five features in mind:  Analytical ability. Is the tool you're considering able to accurately forecast so you know how your yearly budget and spending might evolve? Ensure it provides trend analysis so you know you're spending at the most efficient level, and graphics that break numbers down so the data is easy to explain to stakeholders.  Easy scalability. Your cloud monitoring tool should scale with your company. If you're midway through a cloud migration, you'll want a tool that can support you through the migration. If you need to scale your business back, your chosen tool should be able to keep pace.  Straightforward integration. Your chosen tool should integrate easily with your cloud provider (ex: AWS, GCP, Azure) so that all of your tools continue to operate at optimal performance post-integration.  Full automation. One of the biggest appeals of a FinOps tool is its ability to automate simple but tedious tasks like cost management, budgeting, and tracking. Seamless user experience. Since FinOps tools offer so many capabilities, sometimes the learning curve can be steep. You'll want to look for a tool that offers a user-friendly experience with intuitive dashboards and a simple interface.  No matter your company size or goals, these five needs will remain the same. Keep these top of mind and you’ll find a FinOps tool that perfectly fits your organization (trust us, we’re the experts!).  Overcome gaps in native solutions with Anodot    Anodot’s cloud cost management solution provides complete, end-to-end visibility into an organization’s entire cloud infrastructure and related billing costs. By monitoring cloud metrics together with revenue and business metrics, Anodot enables cloud teams to understand the true cost, utilization, and performance of their cloud services. With continuous monitoring and deep visibility, businesses gain the power to align FinOps, DevOps, and Finance teams and reduce their total cloud bill.   Multicloud Visibility - Anodot seamlessly combines all of your cloud spend into a single platform. Monitor and optimize your cloud cost and resource utilization across AWS, GCP, and Azure.  Eliminate Waste –  Anodot’s easy-to-action savings recommendations enable your DevOps team to easily implement spending and service changes that can drive significant savings.  Allocate Costs – See cost causation and allocate spend by service, business unit, team, and app with deep visibility across AWS, Azure, GCP, and pod-level Kubernetes.  Enable FinOps – Avoid bill shock with near real-time alerts and insightful, ML-driven forecasting.  Anodot also provides granular insights into Kubernetes that no other cloud optimization platform offers. Businesses can easily track spending and usage across clusters with detailed reports and dashboards. Anodot for Cloud Costs’ powerful algorithms and multi-dimensional filters enable a deep dive into performance and identify under-utilization at the node level. 

Most customers running Kubernetes clusters Amazon EKS are regularly looking for ways to better understand and control their costs. While EKS simplifies Kubernetes operations tasks, customers also want to understand the cost drivers for containerized applications running on EKS and best practices for controlling costs. Anodot has collaborated with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to address these needs and share best practices on optimizing Amazon EKS costs. You can read the full post here on the AWS website. Amazon EKS pricing model The Amazon EKS pricing model contains two major components: customers pay $0.10 per hour for each configured cluster, and pay for the AWS resources (compute and storage) that are created within each cluster to run Kubernetes worker nodes. While this pricing model appears straightforward, the reality is more complex, as the number of worker nodes may change depending on how the workload is scaled. Understanding the cost impact of each Kubernetes component Kubernetes costs within Amazon EKS are driving by the following components: Clusters: When a customer deploys an AWS EKS cluster, AWS creates, manages, and scales the control plane nodes. Features like Managed Node Groups can be used to create worker nodes for the clusters. Nodes: Nodes are the actual Amazon EC2 instances that pods run on. Node resources are divided into resources needed to run the operating system; resources need to run the Kubernetes agents; resources reserved for the eviction threshold, and resources available for your pods to run containers. Pods: A pod is a group of one or ore containers and are the smallest deployable units you can create and manage in Kubernetes. How Resource Requests Impact Kubernetes Costs Pod resource requests are the primary driver of the number of EC2 instances needed to support clusters. Customers specify resource requests and limited for vCPU and memory when pods are configured. When a pod is deployed on a node, the requested resources are allocated and become unavailable to other pods deployed on the same node.  Once a node's resources are fully allocated, a cluster autoscaling tool will spin up a new node to host additional pods. Incompletely configuring resource specifications can impact the cost within your cluster. Tying Kubernetes Investment to Business Value with Anodot  Anodot's cloud cost management platform monitors cloud metrics together with revenue and business metrics, so users can understand the true unit economics of customers, applications, teams and more. With Anodot, FinOps stakeholder from finance and DevOps can optimize their cloud investments to drive strategic initiatives. Anodot correlates metrics collected with data from the AWS Cost and Usage Report, AWS pricing, and other sources. This correlation provides insight into pod resource utilization, nodes utilization and waste. It also provides visibility into the cost of each application that is run. Anodot's cost allocation feature enables users to produce rule-powered maps that associate costs with business cost centers. Simple or complex rules can be defined for tags, namespaces, deployments, labels and other identifiers. Users can visualize the maps and create dashboards to better understand cost per department, application, or unit metric.  

The total transaction value of digital payments is projected to exceed $1.7 billion by the end of 2022. Each one of these transactions generates masses of data that contains critical insights for merchants, payment service providers, acquirers, fintechs, and other stakeholders in the payments ecosystem. Having real-time access to these insights has the power to drive growth through customer and market understanding. It also has the power to protect against tremendous revenue loss by mitigating the risk of payment issues and fraud. The payments data mandate   Real-time payment monitoring and detection of transaction incidents is one of payment data’s most important mandates. Whether there’s an increase in payment failures, a drop in approval rates, or other issues — operations, payments, and risk managers must be able to see what went wrong, where, and why.  This is the only way they can accelerate root cause analysis and quickly triage and resolve payment incidents.  But gaining complete visibility into the payments ecosystem in real time in order to detect anomalies immediately is a great challenge, though one that no organization can afford to ignore.  Time could not be more of the essence. Consider what happens if there is a glitch in an API to a backend payment system that is crucial for approvals. If transactions can’t access the relevant API, the payment acceptance rate will plummet and revenue will be lost during the unexpected downtime.  So, while organizations are collecting large volumes of data every day, if the data can’t be used to protect the organization against payment incidents and potential loss, the value of the data will never be realized and losses will continue to impact business health.  Challenges of optimizing payments data   The bridge between collecting payment data and using it effectively is full of obstacles, which primarily fall into three categories – access, process and infrastructure, and complexity. Access to user data User onboarding: Aggregating user data is complicated by the fact that assuring a good user onboarding and registration experience typically requires asking as few questions as possible (to avoid abandonment due to complicated and time-consuming processes). Owning the relationship: Most payments stakeholders don't necessarily own the end user relationship. This means they don’t have access to the relevant user data, making it all the more difficult to detect which user activities are anomalous. Tokenization: Access to user data is also hindered when using external tokenization, which keeps most of the user and card information with the tokenizer rather than with the merchant or payments service provider. Data privacy: Detecting anomalous behaviors requires aggregating data about user behavior. However, data privacy regulations and regulators limit the usage of personal user information. Equal access: Even when the right user data is being collected by the organization, not all departments have equal access to it, nor is it shared sufficiently and frequently enough by those who do have access.    Process & infrastructure related Processes are manual resulting in monitoring and detection that are slow and error-prone with real-time outcomes being impossible to achieve. Real-time collection and analysis for timely decision making is impractical due to the complexity involved with the implementation and application of the numerous APIs required for collection. Intelligent insights provided in real time are typically out of reach since no one-size-fits-all solution can address the variety of incidents that occur during the specific recovery and handling processes of each organization.   Complexity The payment ecosystem is continually growing with more systems and data sources than ever, making it very difficult to collect and connect relevant payments data. Sources and data formats are fragmented, also making the task of aggregating data into one coherent source of truth a difficult task. Different payment methods and flows carry different data sets impacting the ability to unify operational data. Not all data is being collected via APIs leaving a lot of gaps since not all the data can be gathered.   Getting the most out of payments data   The goal of overcoming these challenges is to be able to get the most out of payments data. In order to optimize payment operations, teams should be able to:   Leverage data for actionable insights specifically into user activity in order to detect anomalous behaviors. Access all relevant user data, which is enabled by integrations that entail implementing every relevant API, not only those which are related to payments instructions. Gain a fuller picture of user behaviors for better understanding what is anomalous, which is enabled by embedding external data sources into the existing data management environment. Analyze data to build forecasts regarding activity, money flow, user behaviors, seasonality, and more, and not only for understanding what has happened, which drives a better understanding of potential risk. Make intelligence-driven decisions and remove the burden of manual work from payments personnel, which is enabled by AI and machine learning. Better understand the scope and patterns of user behaviors and payments trends, which is enabled by analyzing data across multiple time periods and granularities. Anodot for payment intelligence    Anodot for payment monitoring and real-time incident detection overcomes the challenges to payment operations, incident detection and remediation. Anodot’s AI-powered solution autonomously monitors the volume and value of payment data, including transaction counts, payment amounts, fees, and much more.  The solution delivers immediate alerts when there are payment approval failures, transaction incidents and merchant issues. Our patented correlation technology helps to identify the root cause of issues for accelerating time to remediation.  Anodot automates payment operations, seamlessly integrating notifications into your organization’s workflow. And by filtering through alert noise and false positives to surface the most important issues, it minimizes the impact on revenue and merchants. Turnkey integrations aggregate data sources into one centralized analytics platform. With impactful payment metrics and dimensions pre-configured into the solution, anyone in the organization can leverage data for insights and actions. 

Top 5 FinOps Tips The efficiency, flexibility and strategic value of cloud computing are driving organizations to deploy cloud-based solutions at rapid pace. Fortune Business Insights predicts the global cloud computing market will experience annual growth of nearly 18% through 2028. As the cloud becomes one of the most expensive resources for modern organizations, cloud financial management, or FinOps, has become a critical initiative. FinOps is a practice that combines data, organization and culture to help companies manage and optimize their cloud spend. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to FinOps and cloud costs management, but there are specific actions practitioners can take to make the most impact. Anodot's FinOps specialist, Melissa Abecasis, shares her top 5 tips for FinOps success in this video. They include: 1. Tag Resources A well-defined cloud tagging policy is the backbone of cloud governance setup and Melissa says it's never too early to start tagging your resources to enable accurate cost chargeback and showback. When deciding what tags to implement, it’s best to start with a simple list  to make it easier to  get into the habit of tagging resources. Tags by application, owner, business unit, environment and customer are all commonly tagged resources. 2. Savings Plan Commitments Melissa suggests that if organizations know they will be using AWS in the next year or so, there is no reason not to take advantage of AWS Compute Savings Plans. The plans allow subscribers to pay lower costs in exchange for committing to use particular AWS services for one to three years. Melissa says commitment savings can be as high as 50%, so even if you have 10% or 20% underutilization of a resource, you're still achieving significant savings. 3. Private Pricing AWS provides private pricing for a variety of services. The most common include Cloudfront, Data Transfer and S3. Melissa says you may be eligible if  have usage of: more than 10 terabytes for Cloudfront data transfer out, 500 terabytes of interagency data transfer, 500 terabytes of data transfer out or petabyte of S3 per month. If these apply to your organization, Melissa suggests speaking with your AWS account manager about the significant savings you can achieve through private pricing. 4. Don't Ignore Smaller Costs An organization's  top 10 cloud services typically account for 70% - 90% of total cloud costs. But Melissa urges FinOps practitioners not to ignore the smaller services. For services that cost $100 to $1,000 a month, it's still worth gaining visibility into each to determine if there are forgotten backups that are no longer needed or testing environments that are not being used. Those small wins can add up to thousands of dollars a day. 5. Create Company Awareness From day one, Melissa says it's important to create company awareness of cloud operations. FinOps teams should assign who is responsible for the cloud service, who is going to check the bill at the end of the month and who is going to learn and implement the strategies necessary to optimize costs and reduce cloud waste. [CTA id="6c56537c-2f3f-4ee7-bcc1-1b074802aa4c"][/CTA] Achieve FinOps Success with Anodot Anodot is the only FinOps platform built to measure and drive success in FinOps, giving you complete visibility into your KPIs and baselines, savings recommendations to help you control cloud waste and spend, and reporting to make sure you improve your cloud efficiency. Anodot enables cloud teams to understand the true cost of their cloud resources, with benefits such as:  AI-based Analysis for Identifying Inefficiencies and Anomalies With the help of machine learning and artificial intelligence, Anodot’s cloud cost solution analyzes data to find gaps and inefficiencies in the system. It can also catch anomalies in various parameters such as usage, cost, performance, etc., thus solving the inefficiency challenge.  Savings Recommendations  Continuously eliminate waste and optimize your infrastructure with personalized recommendations for unknown saving opportunities that can be implemented in a few steps. Real-Time Cost Monitoring  Monitoring cloud spend is quite different from other organizational costs in that it can be difficult to detect anomalies in real-time. Cloud activity that isn’t tracked in real-time opens the door to potentially preventable runaway costs. Anodot enables companies to detect cost incidents in real time and get engineers to take immediate action.  Cost and Usage Forecasting   Anodot’s AI-driven solution analyzes historical data in order to accurately forecast cloud spend and usage by unit of choice, anticipate changing conditions and get a better read on related costs. This helps organizations to make more informed budgeting decisions and find the right balance between CapEx and OpEx.   

AWS re:Invent, one of the biggest tech events in the world, is just weeks away. While there are thousands of sessions to choose from, there's bound to be high interest in sessions focused on cloud cost optimization and management. That's because maximizing cloud efficiency and reducing waste is ranking as a top priority, and a challenge for organizations of all sizes. If cloud cost savings is important for your business, we've compiled a list of the best sessions to attend. You can find the sessions listed below by visiting the AWS re:Invent Session Catalog where there is an option to search by keyword and register. Anodot is leading one of the sessions — focusing on the power of insight to accelerate AWS — and will be exhibiting at booth #2540 where you can get one-on-one time with one of our cloud experts to learn how to optimize your AWS cloud spend. Book a meeting here to secure your spot! Monday, November 28 Spot the savings: Use Amazon EC2 Spot to optimize cloud deployments   CMP324-R | Time: 1:00 - 3:00 PM | Session Type: Workshop  Amazon EC2 Spot Instances are spare compute capacity available to you for less than On-Demand prices. EC2 Spot enables you to optimize your costs and scale your application’s throughput. This workshop walks you through the APIs and commands used to create Spot Instances: You create an EC2 launch template and then use the launch template to launch Spot Instances using EC2 Auto Scaling groups, EC2 Spot Fleet, EC2 Fleet, and EC2 RunInstances API. Also learn how to implement Spot functions such as Spot placement score, attribute-based instance selection, and AWS Fault Injection Simulator. Cloud metrics strategy and customizable billing   COP202-R | Time: 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM |  Session Type: Chalk Talk A well-defined cloud metrics strategy helps organizations evaluate the efficiency of cloud resource utilization and tell a cloud value story that is aligned with business outcomes. The ability to customize pricing and billing views allows you to charge back to your end users in a streamlined process. Join this session to learn how you can construct KPI strategies and accountability with services such as AWS Billing Conductor and start running your IT department like a business. Visualizing AWS Config and Amazon CloudWatch usage and costs   COP215-R | Time: 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM | Session Type: Chalk Talk  In this session, explore dashboards that you can deploy into your own account to get a real-time view of some of the typical main contributors to AWS Config and Amazon CloudWatch costs. The dashboards are designed to help you identify high-cost areas and see the impact of any changes made over time. You can deploy the dashboards into your own account and explore how to create and modify them for your own needs. How to save costs and optimize Microsoft workloads on AWS   ENT205 | Time: 4:00 - 5:00 PM | Session Type: Breakout Session Customers have been running Microsoft workloads on AWS for 14 years—longer than any other cloud provider—giving AWS unmatched experience to help you migrate, optimize, and modernize your Windows Server and SQL Server workloads. In this session, learn best practices and see demos on how to right-size your infrastructure and save on Microsoft licensing costs; how to configure your workloads to run more efficiently; how to avoid expensive and punitive licensing restrictions; and how AWS offers you the most and highest performing options for your Microsoft workloads. How SingleStore saves 56 percent on Amazon EC2 with no DevOps hours invested    PRT095 | Time: 5:10 - 5:25 | Session Type: Lightning Talk  For SingleStore, the cost of data is high. To manage the cost of running their SQL distributed database, SingleStore aimed to drive cost efficiency as far as they could. SLA requirements for data continuity prevented them from utilizing highly discounted Amazon EC2 Spot Instances. But the long-term commitments associated with other discount programs made them too risky to cover fluctuating workloads. In this lightning talk Ken Dickinson, VP of Cloud Infrastructure at SingleStore, explains how SingleStore was able to ramp up their Amazon EC2 savings even further. Learn how they covered 99 percent of their workloads to help them break through their previous savings ceiling. This presentation is brought to you by Zesty, an AWS Partner. Tuesday, November 29 Continuous cost and sustainability optimization   SUP304 | Time: 11:45 - 1:45 | Session Type: Workshop In this workshop, learn best practices for cost and sustainability optimization. Shift costs and sustainability responsibilities from the Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) to end users and application owners aided by automation at scale. Learn about cost efficiency and implementing mechanisms that empower application owners to have clear, actionable tasks for cost and sustainability optimization building upon real-world use cases. You must bring your laptop to participate. How to use Amazon S3 Storage Lens to gain insights and optimize costs   STG335 | Time: 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM | Session Type: Builder's Session  As your dataset grows on Amazon S3, it becomes increasingly valuable to use tools and automation to manage and analyze your data and optimize storage costs. In this builders’ session, learn about Amazon S3 Storage Lens which delivers a single view of object storage usage and activity across your entire Amazon S3 storage. It includes drill-down options to generate insights at the organization, account, Region, bucket, or even prefix level. Walk through S3 Storage Lens, and learn how to get started with this feature with your own storage. You must bring your laptop to participate. Multi- and hybrid-cloud cost optimization with Flexera One    Time: 2:40 PM - 2:55 PM | Session Type: Lightning Talk In this talk, Flexera discusses and demonstrates the Cloud Cost Optimization (CCO) functionality of the Flexera One platform. See how CCO allows you to achieve a true single-pane-of-glass view for all multi-cloud resources, including global regions of major cloud providers and emerging and niche cloud offerings. Using CCO’s Common Bill Ingestion functionality, any additional cloud resource costs (support costs, labor costs, VAT, etc.) can be ingested into the platform and viewed and analyzed alongside existing cloud resources. All phases of the FinOps framework are activated within CCO and will be included in this demonstration. This presentation is brought to you by Flexera, an AWS Partner. AWS optimization: Actionable steps for immediate results   STP210-R1 | Time: 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM | Session Type: Theatre Session Cash burn is a hot topic for startups, and late-stage funded ventures especially need to keep tabs on budget as they ramp up. AWS offers resources to make cost management, budget tracking, and optimization simple and attainable for startups of any size. In this session, get familiar with the different technical strategies, levers to pull, and commitment-based savings plans AWS offers. After this session, you will have an actionable plan with a combination of tactical and strategic initiatives that can help you reduce overall spend and increase your runway.   Scaling performance and lowering cost with the right choice of compute   CMP318-R | Time: 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM | Session Type: Chalk Talk  This chalk talk covers the latest innovations across Intel, AMD, and AWS Graviton compute options (i.e., Intel Ice Lake, AMD Milan, and AWS Graviton3) to help companies choose the optimal instance for their workloads. Learn about the price performance benefits enabled by AWS compute options and the AWS Nitro System across a broad spectrum of workloads. Simplify your AWS cost estimation   Time: 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM | Session Type: Breakout Session  Take the guesswork out of planning with AWS: accurately evaluate the cost impact of your AWS workloads as you grow and save on AWS. Join this chalk talk to learn how you can plan for changes to your workload and simplify your cost estimate. Understand how modifications of your purchase commitments, resource usage, and commercial terms affect your future AWS spend.   Optimize for cost and availability with capacity management   CMP319 | Time: 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM | Session Type: Chalk Talk  Managing your capacity footprint at the enterprise level can be complex. This chalk talk covers how to plan for, acquire, monitor, and optimize your capacity footprint to achieve your goals of maximizing for capacity availability while minimizing costs. Leave this talk with an understanding of how to use Amazon EC2 Capacity Reservations, On-Demand Capacity Reservations, and Savings Plans to lower costs so that you can focus on innovating. Visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs   COP336-R1 | Time: 5:00 - 6:00 | Session Type: Builder's Session  Having actionable cost insights with the right level of cost reporting allows you to scale on AWS with confidence. Join this hands-on builders session to learn which resources are available for you to achieve cost transparency, dive deep into cost and usage data, and uncover best practices and dashboards to simplify your cost reporting. Explore AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) and then learn how to export and query CUR and visualize resource-level data such as AWS Lambda functions and Amazon S3 bucket costs using the CUDOS dashboard. Wednesday, November 30 Cloud FinOps: Empower real-time decision making   PRT322 | Time: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM | Session Type: Breakout Session  As organizations align their processes to the realities of operating in the cloud, they seek to understand what they are spending and, more specifically, how they can analyze their infrastructure in their business context. FinOps practitioners can implement a dedicated solution to analyze data, manage anomalies, and measure unit costs. Join this session to learn how CloudHealth, a recognized leader in FinOps and cloud cost management, gives users the information they need to meet their organizational goals and objectives. This presentation is brought to you by VMware, an AWS Partner.  FinOps: The powerful ability of insight to accelerate AWS (sponsored by Anodot)   PRT035 | Time: 10:55 - 11:10 AM | Session Type: Lightning Talk  Attend this talk to learn how you can empower your business stakeholders with clarity and highly personalized insights to unlock all the cloud has to offer. Learn tactics and best practices for developing your AWS cost management strategy by minimizing noise and maximizing the relevance between your FinOps practice and your unique business objectives. This presentation is brought to you by Anodot, an AWS Partner.   Thursday, December 1 FinOps: Intersecting cost, performance, and software license optimization (sponsored by Flexera)   PRT306 |Time: 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM | Session Type: Workshop  Within the rapidly maturing FinOps discipline, cost is the driving force behind the optimization of cloud resources. Actions taken to optimize costs may be detrimental to application performance or be at odds with licensing restrictions for the software running on those resources. In this workshop, experts from Flexera and IBM Turbonomic identify overlooked aspects of cloud cost optimization and demonstrate how successful FinOps practices require visibility and continuous analysis of performance metrics and licensing constraints when optimizing cloud resources. You must bring your laptop to participate. This presentation is brought to you by Flexera, an AWS Partner. Building a budget-conscious culture at Standard Chartered Bank   CMP213 | Time: 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM | Session Type: Breakout Session  In this session, Standard Chartered Bank shares how FinOps has been embedded in the way they build systems. Critical large systems at Standard Chartered Bank—such as scaling applications, container platforms, and their grid for calculating risk and analytics—use techniques to reduce waste and optimize cost and performance at scale. These techniques include using an optimal combination of AWS Savings Plans and Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, building for elasticity, and applying automation to switch down systems not in use.

We are proud to announce that Anodot has been named Momentum Leader on G2's fall grid for Cloud Cost Management Software. G2 is the largest and most trusted software marketplace. More than 60 million people annually use G2 to make smarter software decisions based on authentic peer reviews. G2 is disrupting the traditional analyst model and building trust by showcasing the authentic voice of millions of software buyers. Global customers use Anodot's cloud cost management solution to monitor and manage their multi-cloud and Kubernetes spend in real-time. G2's grid report is based on user ratings and not information self-reported by vendors. G2 scores products and vendors based on reviews from verified users as well as data aggregated from online source. Here are some of Anodot's most recent reviews on G2: "The best FinOps application" "Simply the best cost management tool on the market"  "Great tool to save time and money"  Cloud visibility and cost control Keeping cloud costs under control is notoriously difficult. Cloud assets are fragmented across multiple teams, cloud vendors and containerized environments. Anodot provides granular visibility into cloud costs and seamlessly combines all of your cloud spend into a single platform. Users can monitor and optimize cost and resource utilization across AWS, Azure and GCP. Anodot's AI/ML powered solution automatically learns each service usage pattern and alerts relevant teams to irregular cloud spend and usage, providing the full context of what is happening so engineers can take action. By monitoring cloud metrics together with revenue and business metrics, Anodot enables cloud teams to understand the true cost of their SaaS customers and features. [CTA id="6c56537c-2f3f-4ee7-bcc1-1b074802aa4c"][/CTA] Cloud cost savings recommendations As companies progress along their FinOps journey, many will face competing initiatives. It can be challenging to prioritize cost optimization recommendations and make sure the right decisions are being made. Identifying the engineering efforts and potential savings can help your team determine priorities. Anodot offers 60+ best-in-class savings recommendations that are highly personalized to your business and infrastructure. CLI and console instructions are provided alongside each savings insight to enable engineers to take action in the way they find most comfortable. Kubernetes visibility for FinOps Kubernetes drives service agility and portability, but it can also be far more difficult to understand just how much each K8s-based application costs. Anodot provides granular visibility into your Kubernetes costs and combines it with your non-containerized costs and business metrics so you can get an accurate view of how much it costs to run a microservice, feature, etc. With Anodot's powerful algorithms and multidimensional filters, you can analyze your performance in depth and identify underutilization at the node and pod level. Cloud cost management with Anodot Bring finance, DevOps and business stakeholders together to collaboratively control and reduce spend across your cloud infrastructures with Anodot. See cost causation and allocate spend by service, business unit, team and app with deep visibility and granular detail. Continuously eliminate waste with easy-to-action savings recommendations Avoid bill shock and enable FinOps with near real-time anomaly detection and alerts Try Anodot's cloud cost management solution with a 30-day free trial. Instantly get an overview of your cloud usage, costs, and expected annual savings.

Smooth payment operations are critical for every merchant’s success. At its most basic level, a seamless and reliable payment process is the key to assuring transaction completion, which is at the very core of a merchant's financial strength.  However, when payment data systems fail to deliver insights about issues regarding approvals, checkouts, fees or fraud, the result is revenue loss and sometimes customer churn. While there are technology solutions that can process millions of transactions daily, there are many challenges to effective payment monitoring, leaving timely identification and speedy resolutions too often out of reach. Payment monitoring challenges There are many challenges to accurate and timely payment monitoring.  Among the most formidable are the increasing complexity of the payment ecosystem, the unreliability of static thresholds, the growing success rates of fraud attempts, and manual analysis processes that are too slow for assuring timely resolutions. Let’s take a closer look. The increasingly complex payments ecosystem  Today’s payments landscape is comprised of many different systems, technologies, methods, and players. There are credit and debit cards, prepaid cards, digital wallets, virtual accounts, mobile wallets and mobile banking, and more. To complicate matters, many organizations that process payments rely on multiple third-party payment providers, who are sometimes their direct competitors. There is an additional challenge for companies offering a localized experience to customers. Using local payment systems sometimes means relying on unstable payment networks and represents a measurable risk to the integrity of payment processes. This broad and ever-growing ecosystem can be confusing and difficult for merchants and payment services providers to orchestrate, especially when it comes to determining the optimal path for monitoring, detecting, and remediating issues with the payment process. Static thresholds  Merchants today typically either monitor transactions manually or receive alerts on payment issues based on static thresholds whose definitions are driven by historical data. But user behavior patterns are dynamic, which means that static, historically driven settings and definitions are not reliable for detecting (and handling) issues in real time. This frequently results in missing incidents or discovering incidents too late after the damage has been done.  The increasing success rates of payments fraud attempts The global ecommerce industry is poised to grow into a $5.4 trillion market by 2026 and with it – online and digital payment fraud is also growing exponentially.  Fraudster techniques have become increasingly more sophisticated and their success rates are higher than ever. Last year, $155 billion in online sales were lost to fraud, and this number is expected to continue to grow.  And according to the recent AFP Payments Fraud and Control Report, 75% of large companies with annual revenue at over $1 billion were hit by payment fraud in the past year, and 66% of mid-size companies with annual revenues at under $1 billion. Manual analysis Even when a payment incident is detected, understanding the root cause for accelerating remediation can still be very challenging. Whether at merchants or financial services organizations, those who are charged with understanding the root cause of payment issues and remediating them are typically faced with having to manually scour through multiple dashboards. This approach which is very time intensive is no longer viable. Decisions need to be made in real time and actions must be taken immediately. A delay in mitigation is not something any organization can afford, as it drives revenue loss. Rules based routing Many merchants and payment services companies route payments as driven by simple rules engines. However, this approach  is not designed to address today’s needs for fast, efficient, and smart routing. To overcome all of these challenges, what these organizations and every merchant needs is a way to detect payment issues faster and get alerts in real time when there are revenue-critical incidents in their payment operations.  This is where AI-powered payment monitoring comes in. [CTA id="3509d260-9c27-437a-a130-ca1595e7941f"][/CTA] AI takes payment monitoring to a whole new level When we introduce AI-powered analytics and real-time monitoring to the task, merchants are finally empowered to overcome the above-mentioned challenges and prevent revenue loss. They can monitor all of their payment data and capture continuous insights into their payment lifecycles. They can know instantly upon the appearance of a suspicious trend or when payments fail and receive real-time alerts that provide the full context of what is happening, including incident impact, timeline, and correlations. Additional benefits include: Faster root cause detection AI-driven payment monitoring learns the normal behavior of all business metrics, constantly monitoring every step in the payment lifecycle, and providing crucial workflow insights.  This happens automatically, where merchants and payment service providers get much-needed visibility into what happened, where it happened, why it happened, and what they should do next, for faster than ever time root cause detection. Real-time actions  When payment monitoring is driven by AI, monitoring and alerting is real-time, empowering organizations to detect and act upon any deviation from normal transaction behavior.  This way they can capture incidents before they impact the customer experience.  Noise alert reduction By learning what impacts customers and the business and what doesn’t, billions of data events can be distilled into a single, scored, highly accurate alert. This makes storms, false positives, and false negatives a thing of the past, and enables teams to focus on the incidents that bring a measurable impact to revenues and the customer experience. Moreover, users will no longer need to subscribe to alerts, which often wind up in the ‘graveyard of alerts’ folder, with no measurable value for the payments operation. Accelerated time to remediation When needed insights can be gathered automatically at the right time, there is no need to sift through endless graphs on multiple dashboards.  AI enables the correlation of anomalies for immediately identifying the contributing factors to incidents, and receiving the full context required for expediting the right remediation actions. How Anodot can help Anodot brings an AI-powered solution for autonomously monitoring the volume and value of a merchant’s payment data, including transaction counts, payment amounts, fees, and more. The solution detects payment incidents 80% faster and profoundly accelerates resolutions, sending immediate alerts when there are transaction or merchant issues, and payment or approval failures. Notifications are seamlessly integrated into existing workflows, with only the most important issues being surfaced to prevent time being wasted on false positives, and profoundly reducing alert noise by 90%. Anodot's patented correlation technology helps to identify the root cause of issues with 50% faster root cause analysis. The out-of-the-box solution comes with turnkey integrations, and is pre-configured with impactful payment metrics and dimensions. This way, organizations can accelerate ROI and time to value.  

7 KPIs for Measuring FinOps Success Public cloud can deliver significant business value across infrastructure cost savings, team productivity, service elasticity, and DevOps agility. Yet, up to 70% of organizations are regularly overshooting their cloud budgets, minimizing the gap between cloud costs and the revenue cloud investments can drive. Cloud cost management (the practice of FinOps — often assigned to a multidisciplinary, cross-functional group, also called “FinOps,” or a “Cloud Center of Excellence”) is targeted at helping businesses maximize the return on their investments in cloud technologies and services. Because managing cloud costs is such a relevant challenge, and is such an area of focus, it has been ascribed many names, including, “Cloud Financial Management,” “Cloud Financial Engineering,” “Cloud Cost Management,” “Cloud Cost Optimization,” and “Cloud Financial Optimization.” Every business with cloud infrastructure will have a cloud cost management strategy, and every successful strategy will include a practice of benchmarking and measurement to ensure progress and improvement towards increasing return on cloud investments. Cloud cost efficiency measurement Amazon Web Services, the largest public cloud service provider, devotes one-sixth of their Well-Architected Framework to avoiding unnecessary costs. While the Cost Optimization Pillar is comprehensive, it is largely written in broad strokes and generalizations, rather than identifying specific tactics and KPIs that can deliver FinOps success. Although valuable, the Well-Architected cost pillar focuses on operationalizing using a plethora of discreet AWS-native tools and offers little insight for businesses with modern multicloud strategies (even ignoring the existence of other public clouds). The FinOps Foundation, a program of The Linux Foundation, segments cloud financial management into FinOps Capabilities (grouped into overarching FinOps Domains) that each consist of “Crawl,” “Walk,” and “Run” operational maturity levels. The maturity level of each capability within a business is assessed according to goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). [CTA id="6c56537c-2f3f-4ee7-bcc1-1b074802aa4c"][/CTA] Simplified FinOps measurement strategies While some FinOps models cover a tremendous amount of ground, and often, even deliver specific KPI targets, they can require months of implementation and corporate cultural change efforts before returning value and meaningful data. This guide endeavors to simplify the measurement of FinOps efficiency into its most important metrics. This approach enables your business to assess the current impact of cloud cost management efforts at the macro level to deliver immediate insights, and can serve as a precursor to significantly more sophisticated and time-consuming FinOps strategies and measurement efforts. As your cloud consumption increases, measuring and tracking cloud efficiency will become a critical task. The following KPIs are critical to understanding the effectiveness of your FinOps efforts and driving incremental success: Percentage of Allocatable Cloud Spend Average Hourly Cost Cloud Unit Costs Percentage of Waste Blend of Purchasing Strategies Time to Address Cost Anomalies Forecasting accuracy Using FinOps to drive cloud efficiency The 7 KPIs above are probably the most important indicators of your cloud account's efficiency, but there are plenty more. Think about the KPIs you currently track in your organization as you review this list. Do you need additional tools or resources to track these KPIs? Defining the KPIs that can measure cloud efficiency is crucial for many organizations. Continuous cost monitoring allows for assessing what percentage of the costs are justified, and where improvements can be made. Cost efficiency is a shared responsibility across multiple levels of an organization. As the FinOps team or expert, it’s our responsibility to make sure we have the proper guardrails, cost monitoring, process optimization, and rate optimization in place. It is then up to the engineering teams using cloud services to make sure the solutions they architect and engineer are as cost-effective as possible. The road to cloud efficiency has many challenges, including: Visibility and cost allocation for multi-cloud and Kubernetes An increase in complexity due to using container-based applications and serverless technologies Identifying and avoiding pitfalls in FinOps adoption It is possible to overcome technology, visibility, and cost allocation challenges by using native Cloud Service Provider tools, building inhouse solutions, or purchasing FinOps tools — such as Anodot cloud cost management Anodot is the only FinOps platform built to measure and drive success in FinOps, giving you complete visibility into your KPIs and baselines, recommendations to help you control cloud waste and spend, and reporting to make sure you improve your cloud efficiency. Identifying and solving organizational challenges is not always easy. Here are a few things you can do from an operational perspective to take action today: You can make different stakeholders aware of their responsibilities by implementing a solid showback model. Cloud cost reporting with real-time data is crucial for the teams to understand how they are doing - make the information available directly to them. Communicate what efforts are being made and what savings can be expected. Mentor and support teams that are facing challenges in their cost efficiency instead of shaming and punishing them. Check out FinOps Foundation for great resources around training and buy-in. Book a demo with an Anodot cloud cost optimization expert to show your team what is achievable with a purpose-built FinOps solution