FinOps-as-a-Service

In our previous blog posts we discussed the comprehensive toolbox AWS offers to monitor, optimize, and govern your cloud spend and have offered a few tips on how you can pick the low hanging fruit while optimizing your cloud costs on your own. 

While enabling you to save considerable amounts of operational costs, native AWS services in conjunction with the best practices described in our previous post, are merely the beginning of your cloud optimization journey. Diving into the nitty gritties of your cloud environment, Cloud FinOps professionals can analyze your traffic routing, resource consumption and payment plans to degrees untrained personnel could not achieve.  

Leveraging Economies-of-Scale

Training your own personnel to achieve these results, on the other hand, would be a long and costly process and probably not be economically viable. While cloud optimization can free up large amounts of capital, keeping a trained professional in-house would most likely consume any proceeds gained. Fortunately, FinOps operations are available as a service. 

Economies of Scale calculations guarantee that a FinOps-as-a-Service team can offer cloud optimization services at rates that pay for themselves, most often many times over. AllCloud, for example, offers free professional FinOps services to customers that join its AWS reseller program, which includes cloud cost management and optimization, alongside many other benefits such as access to AllCloud’s Solutions Factory. 

Members of the program are granted free access to the CloudHealth management platform, which considerably improves financial visibility above and beyond what native AWS services have to offer. Gaining access to CloudHealth, however, is not enough on its own. The dedicated FinOps team, proactively supporting program members, has the means to analyze CloudHealth reports and extract insights and courses of action that otherwise might elude users. 

Identifying Optimization Opportunities Quickly

Since FinOps-as-a-Service teams serve a wide array of diverse customers, their experience with a multitude of cloud environments allows them to spot optimization opportunities quickly, often in minutes. This experience also allows FinOps professionals to identify services that could and should be replaced immediately with more cost-effective alternatives while recommending technology partners, such as Spot.io, which can save considerable costs on compute resources.

A recent example is the modernization project conducted by AllCloud for SentinelOne, a cybersecurity company. While optimizing their environment, AllCloud’s FinOps team immediately spotted abnormal costs in the customer’s bills. An untrained eye might have assumed that the costs, while being high, are within the normal ranges, but our analysts were experienced enough to launch an investigation. 

Using AllCloud’s native solution, NAT Gateway Analyzer, the team was able to identify the overpriced traffic, reroute it and optimize SentinelOne’s architecture to save thousands of dollars.   

With the knowledge and insights provided by the FinOps team, solution architects can craft automated maneuvers that may save additional costs. In some cases, resource adjustments, re-architecting, automations will be recommended that can reduce operational costs even more.    

While AllCloud’s cost management and optimization program provides the necessary analytics and technical guidance for free, implementation still remains the customer’s responsibility. Members of AllCloud’s MSP program however, receive full monitoring, implementation, security management and ongoing maintenance as a service offering. 

If you have further questions regarding cloud optimization or want to discuss our free cloud cost management and optimization program, contact us.