In a recently published report, “Beyond FinOps: Optimizing Your Public Cloud Costs”, Gartner shares a graphic which is adapted from Unravel.
Unravel’s Perspective
How FinOps Helps
Unravel helps organizations adopt a FinOps approach to improve cloud data spending efficiency. FinOps helps organizations address overspend, including under- and over-provisioned cloud services, suboptimal architectures, and inefficient pricing strategies. Infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders and practitioners can use FinOps principles to optimize cloud service design, configuration, and spending commitments to reduce costs. Data and analytics (D&A) leaders and teams are using FinOps to achieve predictable spend for their cloud data platforms.
Introducing Cloud Financial Management and Governance
Cloud Financial Management (CFM) and Governance empowers organizations to quickly adapt in today’s dynamic landscape, ensuring agility and competitiveness. CFM principles help organizations take advantage of the cloud’s variable consumption model through purpose-built tools tailored for your modern cloud finance needs. A well-defined cloud cost governance model lets cloud users monitor and manage their cloud costs and balance cloud spending vs. performance and end-user experience.
Three Keys to Optimizing Your Modern Data Stack
- Cloud data platform usage analysis plays a crucial role in cloud financial management by providing insights into usage patterns, cost allocation, and optimization opportunities. By automatically gathering, analyzing, and correlating data from various sources, such as traces, logs, metrics, source code, and configuration files, organizations can identify areas for cost savings and efficiency improvements. Unravel’s purpose-built AI reduces the toil required to manually examine metrics, such as resource utilization, spending trends, and performance benchmarks for modern data stacks such as Databricks, Snowflake, and BigQuery.
- Cost allocation, showback, and chargeback are essential for effective cloud cost optimization. Organizations need to accurately assign costs to different departments or projects based on their actual resource consumption. This ensures accountability and helps in identifying areas of overspending or underutilization. Automated tools and platforms like Unravel can streamline the cost allocation process for cloud data platforms such as Databricks, Snowflake, and BigQuery, making it easier to track expenses and optimize resource usage.
- Budget forecasting and management is another critical aspect of cloud financial management. By analyzing historical data and usage trends, organizations can predict future expenses more accurately. This enables them to plan budgets effectively, avoid unexpected costs, and allocate resources efficiently. Implementing robust budget forecasting processes can help organizations achieve greater financial control and optimize their cloud spending.
Next Steps
You now grasp the essence of cloud financial management and governance to optimize cloud spending and your cloud data platform. Start your journey and embrace these concepts to enhance your cloud strategy and drive success. Take charge of your Databricks, Snowflake, and BigQuery optimization today with a free health check.
Gartner, Beyond FinOps: Optimizing Your Public Cloud Costs, By Marco Meinardi, 21 March 2024
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