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FinOps

The 7 Best Cloud Financial Planning Solutions For Managing Costs

Making better decisions doesn’t always require more data. Finding the right data and making sure the right people have it at the right time does. This is particularly important for companies that use the cloud. Using cloud financial planning solutions is an excellent way to automate, extend, and align goals with business outcomes in light of the cloud’s complexity. The solution can also help eliminate cumbersome, error-prone manual processes.

How to Implement FinOps Successfully - Episode 5 / Operate Phase

This is the fifth and final part of this FinOps series, The Operate Phase. If you have missed any of my previous blogs, here is a list of posts in the series: Note: I am ex-AWS, so you will notice a lot more focus on AWS tools and services as examples here, however we are cloud agnostic and all cloud providers have similar services and tools.

9 Cloud FinOps Challenges - And The Solutions To Overcome Them

Companies migrate to the cloud to become more productive, respond to market changes, and be flexible — while spending less on cloud infrastructure. But there is one thing that many cloud-based organizations have learned: Cloud costs add up. Fast. As a result, 71% of cloud financial management teams doubt they will achieve expected results at the expected time or at all. Only 29% of cloud FinOps teams expect to achieve their cloud goals.

FinOps Tools: Supercharge Your Investment with Optimization

Cost analysis and allocation tools like CloudHealth, CloudCheckr, and Cloudability play an important role in many organizations’ FinOps journeys by assisting with keeping Finance informed, enabling forecasting, and driving accountability. These tools may also help provide visibility and direction around long-term purchases like Savings Plans and RIs. But, slicing and dicing your cloud costs is only the tip of the FinOps iceberg: 85%+ of your cloud savings potential lies beyond refining how you buy cloud services. You also need to optimize what you’re actually purchasing.

Is FinOps All Talk and No Walk?

I am a big proponent of cross-functional alignment, as I remnded our ELT at a recent off-site meeting. There’s a lot of buzz about FinOps bringing financial accountability to cloud spend by eliminating procurement siloes and implementing cross-functional best practices. As the CFO of a SaaS company, I fully support this practice. In fact, Virtana recently made some changes to our cloud infrastructure as part of our own evolution.

Observability into Your FinOps: Taking Distributed Tracing Beyond Monitoring

Distributed tracing has been growing in popularity as a primary tool for investigating performance issues in microservices systems. Our recent DevOps Pulse survey shows a 38% increase year-over-year in organizations’ tracing use. Furthermore, 64% of those respondents who are not yet using tracing indicated plans to adopt it in the next two years. However, many organizations have yet to realize just how much potential distributed tracing holds.

Good Vs. Bad FP&A: 5 FP&A Best Practices You Should Be Using

Financial planning and analysis is becoming an increasingly strategic part of a SaaS organization. The role of finance is no longer about just taking inputs and calculating how they affect financial plans, but about driving business outcomes through effective financial planning. There is a popular Andreessen Horowitz article titled “Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager” that showcases best practices compared to worst practices.