81% of IT departments either reduced or halted cloud spending in 2022, but maintaining application performance while reducing these costs is difficult even for the most talented engineering teams.
If your organization wants to implement an effective cloud financial management strategy, using the right tools can streamline the process.
In this article, we’ll show you how to use FinOps automation tools to increase cost visibility and help you execute the best optimization practices for substantial cost savings.
What is FinOps automation?
Cloud FinOps automation tools streamline, optimize, and automate the various processes associated with effective cloud cost management, empowering better decision-making and real-time cost optimizations.
This includes tracking costs, analyzing spend patterns, optimizing cloud resource allocation and provisioning, and using the appropriate discount instruments.
The role of automation in cloud cost optimization
Without the right tools, cloud cost optimization is complicated and requires a lot of manual effort and expert know-how. Thankfully, FinOps automation platforms like ProsperOps eliminate these barriers, empowering companies to execute a fully automated cost-optimization strategy.
FinOps automation streamlines and enhances cloud cost optimization by:
- Automatically applying the appropriate discount instruments based on workload requirements
- Rightsizing instances to continuously align with demand
- Detecting cost anomalies for identifying unexpected price increases
- Allocating and tagging costs for improved cost tracking and accountability
By taking the hassle and guesswork out of cloud cost optimization, tools like ProsperOps make controlling cloud costs easier and more reliable.
How does FinOps automation work?
One of the most important elements of FinOps automation is its ability to analyze historical data and cloud spend trends to provide visibility into your costs and identify opportunities for savings.
A FinOps platform will provide optimization recommendations that it can enact automatically from this data. This could include strategies like utilizing discount instruments, rightsizing instances, eliminating idle resources, and detecting cost anomalies.
FinOps automation platforms also provide valuable metrics and insights you can use to further improve your cloud management practices. From predictive analytics to cost allocation, FinOps tools provide the data and transparency companies need to optimize how they use their cloud resources.
Key advantages of using FinOps automation platforms
Here are some advantages you can look forward to when you use an advanced FinOps automation platform:
Resource optimization
FinOps automation platforms can analyze your spending patterns in real time to identify underutilized resources and recommend cost-saving optimizations.
By rightsizing instances, eliminating unused resources, and performing numerous other optimizations, FinOps tools help you use the cloud resources you purchase in the most efficient way possible.
Real-time cost visibility
78% of business executives say their companies have adopted cloud computing in most or all areas of their businesses. Yet despite this increased reliance on cloud services, simply understanding cloud costs remains a major obstacle for many organizations.
FinOps automation platforms can provide real-time cost visibility without requiring manual data collection and analysis. Companies can use this visibility to identify areas of waste and inefficiency, create accountability, swiftly spot spending anomalies, and a wide range of other business-boosting benefits.
Cost accountability and collaboration
The cost visibility provided by FinOps automation platforms also helps promote accountability and collaboration within a company. You can use cost allocation tags to easily track cloud spend and usage across different departments, teams, and projects.
This ability to track cloud spend on a granular level creates a culture that holds everyone in your company accountable for how they use cloud resources.
Common challenges in cloud cost control that FinOps automation can solve
Optimizing cloud costs while still ensuring consistent application performance can create several challenges, including:
Complex cloud pricing models
AWS offers numerous pricing models, including On-Demand pricing, Savings Plans, and Reserved Instances (RIs). On-Demand pricing is AWS’s most straightforward pricing model, but discount instruments, like Savings Plans and RIs, can save companies up to 72%.
Knowing when and how to use these discount instruments is a challenge. Savings Plans and RIs require you to purchase cloud resources in advance, which means cost visibility and accurate forecasting are vital precursors.
FinOps automation platforms provide the visibility and predictive powers companies need to navigate AWS’s various pricing models and discount instruments.
Dynamic cloud environments
The ever-changing demand/complexity of these environments makes it challenging to predict resource needs, which is one of the biggest keys to cloud cost optimization.
FinOps automation tools are better suited for adapting to changing resource needs. These tools are ideal for dynamic cloud environments and can deliver cost transparency and automated optimizations even when resource needs constantly change.
Reactive cost management
Cloud cost tends to be an ever-evolving process requiring continuous monitoring and adjustments, so companies relying on reactive cost management are almost always a step behind where they need to be.
Rather than reactive cost management, FinOps automation platforms empower proactive cost management via continuous monitoring and predictive analytics. These tools can perform cost optimizations automatically and around the clock to create this forward-thinking approach to cost control.
Implementing and integrating automation at your organization
There are a lot of cost optimization tools on the market that provide cost-saving recommendations. But without true rate optimization, this latency is still an issue. In other words, if your company has to analyze and implement each recommendation manually, you’ll still fall behind.
Instead of just providing recommendations, ProsperOps takes action, performing optimizations automatically on your behalf to continually deliver savings outcomes. This means you and your team can focus on other responsibilities while ensuring you optimize your workloads for cost efficiency.
In fact, ProsperOps doesn’t even require you to coordinate significant engineering changes with the platform—meaning engineers are free to modify and optimize compute workloads while ProsperOps finds the best rate for that usage.
When implementing FinOps automation at your company, you’ll need to make a few key considerations to ensure you choose the right platform. These considerations include:
- Making sure the platform is compatible with your cloud provider
- Checking that the platform meets your compliance and data security requirements
- Evaluating whether or not the platform provides the necessary APIs and integrations
- Assessing the scalability of the platform to make sure it is capable of scaling alongside your cloud infrastructure
Accelerate your FinOps automation experience with ProsperOps
FinOps automation is one of the biggest keys to discovering and capitalizing on cloud cost-saving opportunities. If you want to execute an automated cost optimization strategy to save your company money effortlessly, ProsperOps can help!
With ProsperOps, companies can fully automate their cloud cost optimization strategy for real-time optimizations and around-the-clock savings.See for yourself the powerful benefits of FinOps automation, and sign up for a free demo of ProsperOps today!
