Overcoming Challenges to Scaling FinOps

After putting the initial tools and processes in place for a cloud management strategy, many organizations struggle to scale their FinOps to fit their growing cloud needs.

To ensure that the scalability of cloud computing is actually boosting your company’s financial performance, delivering continuous insight and value from cloud investments is critical.

Cyberark, an identity security company, uses Anodot’s cloud cost management solution for achieving ongoing value and savings in their FinOps practice.

In a recent Anodot webinar, Cyberark’s FinOps expert, Uri Eliyahu, discussed solutions to creating an all-encompassing cloud culture and tips for driving organizational alignment around FinOps.

Uri compares cloud computing to the game of chess. Sometimes, you don’t know what you don’t know but you can plan your moves ahead of time.

Uri shared how Cyberark established cloud operations and a Cloud Center of Excellence using tools like Anodot to increase influence across the organization and reduce what is not known about cloud spend and usage.

Cloud Operation Magic Triangle

Traditionally, organizations relied on on-premise data centers which required a CapEx expenditure ahead to purchase hardware and software. With cloud computing, developers or engineers can spin up an instance in one click without oversight or approval from IT or Finance.

To reduce this risk, Uri says companies need to provide tools and processes to make sure cloud engineers can do their work across the following domains: security, FinOps and operations.

Uri says companies should have a vision for building a cloud operations culture, from the top down.

Direct and Indirect Costs 

It’s important to take into consideration direct and indirect costs when budgeting for FinOps. For example, typical direct costs would include services like Amazon EC2, Amazon S3 and Amazon RDS.

But according to Uri, direct costs account for only about 55% of total cloud spend. Indirect costs such as AWS KMS, AWS CloudTrail or data transfer must be considered as well.

Using Anodot to Scale FinOps

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.

Anodot  is built to offer cloud teams a contextual understanding of cloud costs and the impact of business decisions on cloud spend, helping companies achieve unit economics and understand how specific units and/or customers impact cloud metrics including cost, utilization and performance.

From a single platform, Anodot provides complete, end-to-end visibility into your entire cloud infrastructure and related billing costs. By monitoring your cloud metrics together with your revenue and business metrics, Anodot enables cloud teams to understand the true cost of their SaaS customers and features.

Anodot automatically learns each service usage pattern and alerts relevant teams to irregular cloud spend and usage anomalies, providing the full context of what is happening for the fastest time to resolution.

With continuous monitoring and deep visibility, you gain the power to align FinOps, DevOps, and Finance teams and cut your cloud bill.