Weekly CloudNews: The Role of FinOps in Reducing Cloud Costs

Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!

Here are the blogs we’ve posted this week:

• Going Deeper Than the Surface on Cloud Difficulties 

With that, onto this week’s news:

How FinOps can rein in cloud costs

Aaron Tan, TechTarget, March 2, 2022

“With half of key IT spending expected to shift to cloud in the next three years, organisations will need to get a better handle on cloud cost management to make sure their cloud spending continues to deliver business outcomes. According to the FinOps Foundation’s latest State of FinOps survey, North America leads the world with the most FinOps practitioners, followed by Europe and the Middle East. In Asia, the number of FinOps practitioners accounted for about 7.8% of total respondents. 

Cloud service providers have also started to invest in FinOps by providing cloud financial management tools on their platforms, while technology consulting firms have set up FinOps practices to drive the cultural change – such as involving engineers in cost optimisation – and governance needed to reap its benefits. The FinOps lifecycle comprises three phases, starting with the inform phase, which provides visibility into who procured a cloud service, why it was procured and what it is used for, so that the person responsible for the workload is aware of the cost and usage of a cloud service.”

The Primary Reasons Digital Transformation Efforts Fail

Rob Enderle, Datamation, Feb. 25, 2022

“It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the pandemic has driven a massive acceleration toward digital technology that can, and is, being used to reduce vulnerable employee load and increase remote employee capabilities. With 90% of respondents showcasing this acceleration, I wonder more how the 10% who didn’t accelerate will survive in the post-pandemic world. Companies optimizing machine learning (ML)/artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) were only 48%, suggesting most respondents aren’t acting quickly enough. And in a few short years, as often happens when you are having an industrial revolution, they will likely fail or become uncompetitive. Digital transformation, when done right, can be a massive force multiplier.

However, on the negative side, the barriers to adoption are significant, suggesting many attempting to do digital transformation poorly may be in worse shape than companies that aren’t trying to do it at all.  As with all major transformations, this report also showcases a significant problem with the skills/knowledge gap and poor data analysis: 44% of respondents highlighted this skills gap as a significant problem; and 39% reported a lack of infrastructure optimization and inadequate data analysis. This report, unlike others I’ve seen in the past, doesn’t suggest that digital acceleration efforts are pointless. They do clearly have value. But that value can’t be achieved if speed is prioritized over quality, which seems to be the problem with around half of the companies sampled. We need to make sure any major company transformation is properly founded with adequate training. In the end, digital transformation will be critical to the success of most companies, but only if they lay a proper foundation and execute quickly after the best direction has been properly identified.”  

Use the cloud to strengthen your supply chain

David Lithincum, InfoWorld, Feb. 25, 2022

“When will the supply chains get better? According to a survey from The Wall Street Journal, about 45% of economists believe that it will take until the second half of 2022. As I researched supply chain data, we seem to be at about the same level of supply chain efficiency as last year, in 2021, which is not good. Although the supply chain disruptions have been caused by several issues, including the pandemic, labor shortages in trucking and other industries, and availability of raw materials, the little-known secret is that supply chain and logistics systems have just not been up to the task of dealing with these anomalies.

I’m seeing a few companies that have leveraged cloud computing as a critical weapon against many of these issues. Best I can tell, less than 5% of the companies that depend on supply chains for their revenue have taken steps to put these systems in place. In many instances, the systems must be customized for a specific company, and that means even more cost and risk.

The rise of industry clouds may change some of this. Indeed, it won’t take long for the public cloud providers to adopt and provide these types of services. Those who wish to gain this advantage will just use the services from the public cloud providers and not have to build their own. So, the next time you deal with a company that is indeed able to deliver as promised no matter what the market conditions are, see if they are leveraging cloud computing as a core innovative platform to set them apart when the markets become difficult. Who do you want to do business with?”

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