Given the strategic importance of the cloud and size of cloud expenditures, it’s critical for enterprises to have solid controls in place to manage it all. According to our latest research, however, while most organizations agree with that sentiment, very few have put it into practice. There are distinct but related disciplines that come into play: FinOps and cloud governance. In this two-part series, we explore current state of each.

Cloud migration is a complex process, and the more up-front planning you put into it, the more likely you’ll be able to avoid challenges and setbacks during execution. And yet, challenges and setbacks seem to be the norm, not the exception, with almost three-quarters (72%) of those surveyed stating that they’ve run into problems so big they were forced to move migrated applications back on premises or jump into firefighting mode to figure out how to fix them quickly.

Dell Technologies World is upon us, and in addition to being a welcomed return to the in-person format, it’s also an opportunity for me to reflect on Virtana’s long history with Dell, our integration points, and the synergies with the Dell portfolio.

By now, most of us know that migrating workloads to the cloud isn’t like simply moving software from one server to another—especially in a complex enterprise infrastructure with many interdependent services and components. There are a lot of things that can go wrong: technical public cloud provisioning issues, security and compliance challenges, lack of cloud skills, wrong public cloud service provider (CSP) selection, unexpected costs, and more.

Rightsizing is about finding the optimal cloud configuration options to ensure that you get the performance you need—within any given constraints you are operating under—at the lowest possible cost. This is a simple proposition, but deceptively so. For one thing, business requirements are constantly changing, meaning that your workloads must adapt to support them, which in turn changes their operating parameters.

Every company exerts some level of effort to manage costs, performance, and risk in their hybrid cloud environment. But to ensure that those activities are performed consistently and efficiently across the board, you need a framework of policies, processes, controls, and tracking. In other words, you need cloud governance.

Everyone is doing it. No, I am not talking about the latest Tik Tok challenge… The thing that everybody is doing—every company, that is—is that they are spending more money in the cloud than they need to. In fact, 82% of respondents in our own recent survey admitted that their organizations have incurred unnecessary cloud costs.

Not all cloud cost management tools are equal. Whether you’re in the process of evaluating cloud cost management vendors or already have a tool in place, here are 19 questions you should ask to ensure you have all the capabilities needed to maximize performance and minimize cost of your hybrid cloud deployment across the following.

In a survey we conducted last year, we discovered that many enterprises overestimate their ability to optimize their hybrid cloud infrastructures. More than three-quarters of respondents gave themselves high marks for a range of capabilities. Here’s the exact breakdown of the number who rated their abilities a 4 or 5 out of 5: This sounds like great news, except there’s a problem. When we asked about how easy it is to get a global view of cloud costs, 42% said that it takes some effort.

Unless you are one of the 1% of enterprises that have zero workloads running in the publice cloud, you need a cloud cost optimization tool. Yes, you do. And if you have workloads running in multiple public clouds—which somewhere in the neighborhood of 85% of enterprises do—you really need a cloud cost optimization tool. If I’m preaching to the choir, feel free to skip to the end of this article where you’ll find a link to try Virtana Optimize for free.