by Lior Bialik, VP Cloud at Comm-IT and Joe Brown, Content Strategist

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How do you know you are making the most of the cloud? You could set up resource monitoring tools. You could compare the costs of holding data centers on site to the much lower costs of cloud-based data servers. You could even count the hours involved in physical maintenance that you have saved.

But today, with so many services, infrastructures and tools offered on the cloud, by AWS, Microsoft and other providers – how do you know you are utilizing the right one for your business needs? In one word –FinOps.

FinOps (abbreviation of Financial Operations) is the practice of being aware of the actual demand you respond to and of matching it with the best possible cloud solution, whether infrastructure or service.  The key to successful FinOps lies in establishing clearly understandable and accepted metrics for your organization and regular, ongoing reporting with actionable items. FinOps experts provide customers with the tools and reports to not only control costs but also rapidly respond to consumption and to market changes, even at the architectural level.

FinOps reviews cover many aspects of your cloud solution, in order to make sure your organization is making the biggest bang for your buck. From identifying performance indicators, through setting up spending and consumptions alerts, to rightsizing and in-depth rethinking of your architecture, our experts have your financial health at heart.  They will setup saving and reservation plans for relevant parts of your architecture, establish KPIs by which you should start or stop automation. And determine data life cycle management steps with intelligent storage tiering and determine the parameters or auto-scaling.

For instance, by reviewing the AWS Cost and Usage Reports, they can examine the box-usage that comes with running Amazon EC2 instances and suggest intelligent improvements to your system, and by surveying the AWS Cost Explorer they can discover opportunities to save wisely on costs across your cloud services.

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