Solving the Cloud Cost Paradox

“You’re crazy if you don’t start in the cloud; you’re crazy if you stay on it,” quips a recent blog post from Andreessen Horowitz.

Many companies are surprised by cloud bills that have shot past their expectations. Indeed, IDC predicts increased investment in public cloud cost management through 2022 as enterprises seek to cut cloud waste by 50%^[1].

This is the Cloud Cost Paradox. There is no doubt that companies need to embrace the efficiencies that come with cloud—but they must also instill data driven control and governance to ensure the spend is not excessive or unnecessary. This is exactly the challenge Hitachi Vantara is setting out to solve for every enterprise on a cloud transformation journey.

We are proud to introduce Hitachi Cloud FinOps portfolio of services designed to help organizations optimize cloud economics. The suite of consulting services provide turnkey assessment, implementation and managed service enabled by proven accelerators, methodologies, and best practices. As stated in our press release, the end goal is to help data driven organizations make money as they embrace cloud – saving cost in right places while still maintaining the proper agility and scale to deliver their business and IT results.

New Hitachi Cloud FinOps Services for Cloud Financial Management

Hitachi Vantara’s solution to this paradox is a FinOps-led approach that takes the complexity out of managing public, hybrid and multicloud environments. The new portfolio is comprised of the following three offers:

• Cloud FinOps Assessment Service – Hitachi Vantara assesses the customer’s current cloud cost relative to benchmarks, industry standards and recommendations. Analysts then provide a current state visibility report, which identifies areas where costs can be optimized. Hitachi Vantara also includes best practices, a feedback loop for continuous improvement, and support toward execution.
• Cloud FinOps Implementation Service – To execute on cost optimization opportunities identified in the assessment phase, Hitachi Vantara offers a professional services engagement to implement changes that will take out costs from cloud platforms and enable the effective use of real-time cloud cost decision support. Analysts map spending data to the business, define budgets and forecasts, set tagging strategy and compliance. The approach includes score cards, benchmarks and dashboards.

• Cloud FinOps Managed Service – For enterprises who wish to retain continuous as-a-Service support for managing cloud costs, Hitachi Vantara offers a an always-on, managed service that helps enterprises to consistently optimize and govern their cloud spend against their business objectives. This includes automated ways of enterprise-wide cloud consumption reporting, resource tracking via tagging, cost monitoring and continuous cost optimization through right-sizing and usage of correct cloud services. Hitachi Vantara delivers automation and integration for managing cloud cost metrics and supports cloud service life cycle management through financial analysis and cost management.

Your Cloud, Your Way with Hitachi Vantara

Your cloud environment is built to meet your business goals and you are unique in terms of what will define the right balance between cost, services, and agility for your cloud strategy. Whether you are deploying a hybrid, distributed or multicloud environment, it is essential to have a seamless, resilient, self-healing and efficient cloud operation (CloudOps) to effectively manage workloads through the application lifecycle of build, deploy, and operate. Along with Hitachi Vantara’s cloud migration and application modernization services, we also provide a growing portfolio of CloudOps services. Today’s Hitachi Cloud FinOps services is the first of more to come.

Overall, our cloud services are built on decades of expertise in three foundational technology elements: 1) cloud and app modernization, 2) enterprise modernization and 3) data modernization.

We help our customers in their cloud journey using our unique E3 methodology — envision, evaluate and execute — which delivers continuous improvement across the lifecycle of our client’s cloud and digital transformation journey.

Combined, our services and methodologies help customers gain complete visibility and management, optimize their could costs and reduce spend, lower their total cost of ownership, operate with control, and reduce risk with real time analytics.

Let Hitachi Vantara take the complexity out of managing your cloud cost, so you can do your cloud, your way.

Resources

• Your Cloud, Your Way
• Blog: Cloud Costs Through the Roof? Don’t Worry — We’ve Got You Covered
• Point of View: Cloud Cost Optimization with FinOps

^[1] IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Cloud 2021 Predictions, Doc # US46420120, October 2020