Cloud Costs Through the Roof? Don’t Worry — We’ve Got You Covered

Does it feel like your business is paying too much for cloud services? You are not alone. Cloud costs are expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 10.5% to 13.1% through 2025, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC). While getting a handle on those cloud costs may be tricky, you don’t have to worry — we’ve got you covered.

When combined with governance, automation and the right expertise, cloud cost management strategies based on cloud FinOps principles can bring you the speed and innovation benefits you’ve sought from your cloud investment, with an eye on your budget.

FinOps brings together your financial, technical and business functions so that they work together to optimize your cloud spend. By combining expertise, systems and best practices, and creating a cost-conscious culture focused on cloud financial management, you can increase your organization’s ability to understand cloud costs and make better business tradeoffs.

Hitachi Vantara’s tested and proven three-prong approach helps businesses optimize cloud costs while driving innovation. Our cloud FinOps approach helps organizations:

• Gain control over cloud spend with real-time visibility and predictable usage.
• Get more value from the cloud by balancing cost, speed and quality.
• Future-proof the organization with best-in-industry cloud services.

Here are three such businesses across multiple industries that have implemented these cloud cost management elements.

Cloud Cost Optimization — Know Where the Money Is Going and Why

After a series of acquisitions, a leading financial-services firm found itself with a siloed IT organization spanning multiple global business units. Each business unit had its own IT environment that included various tooling, security and cloud resources. Existing data centers weren’t sufficient for the organization’s needs. With cost-containment pressure from leadership and evolving competitive threats from more nimble fintech companies, the organization needed to respond with urgency. It turned to Hitachi Vantara for help.

After assessing the company’s existing portfolio and understanding its future requirements, Hitachi Vantara’s cloud experts determined that the company could benefit from a hybrid-cloud approach. An analysis of return on investment (ROI) showed the benefits of balancing the company’s physical data center footprint with modern infrastructure resources and leveraging public cloud resources. This cloud cost management approach improved the customer experience by enabling quicker response times and helped the company manage its cost and carbon footprint.

Following our assessment service, part of Hitachi Cloud FinOps Services, the firm implemented a highly automated converged infrastructure. It migrated and modernized the determined applications on a public cloud, with Managed Cloud Services from Hitachi Vantara, including infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud computing, managed backups and patching, modern cloud security and 24/7 monitoring and support. This helped the company balance cost, agility and quality to compete and delivered the following benefits:

• Agility and quality.
  • Integrated IT across acquired companies and added next-generation security.
  • Migrated and modernized applications for the cloud.
  • Reduced outsourcing costs significantly, without increasing IT workload.

• Cost visibility and cloud cost optimization.
  • Improved C-suite visibility into burndown per business unit in real time.
  • Cut compute costs in half.
  • Achieved double-digit cost reduction across clouds.
  • Eliminated wasted spend by rightsizing cloud resources based on actual consumption.
  • Increased budget capacity for new workloads in the cloud.

• Cost predictability.
  • Gained real-time budget monitoring and alerts for budget overruns.
  • Managed costs to allow for accurate forecasts and budgeting.

Optimize Cloud Costs While Balancing Cost, Speed and Quality

An international energy trading company needed a data-migration strategy after it was acquired. Downtime was not an option, as the company’s customers relied on its pricing, real-time news and expert analysis to buy and sell oil, gas and petrochemical products, worldwide.

All of this data resided in data centers and needed to be migrated in a way that gave fast, easy access to its new parent company while aligning with its existing IT infrastructure. This included multiple cloud accounts managed in silos across eight business units, hosting as many as 40 applications that needed to be reconciled. In addition, cloud-native development activity often went over budget because of a lack of timely cloud-cost optimization.

Hitachi Vantara cloud experts helped break down silos between teams, including tech, finance, infrastructure and leadership. Through our implementation service, part of Hitachi Cloud FinOps Services, the company gained the ability to manage costs holistically, with complete visibility for stakeholders. Hitachi Vantara also helped the company migrate thousands of applications and massive amounts of data to achieve the following benefits:

• Cost visibility and cloud cost optimization.
  • Optimized monthly cost structure and performance through managed services.
  • Cut costs by a third through rightsizing of compute services, database services and in-memory data stores.
  • Saved money on storage and automated cleanup of unused cloud resources.

• Cost predictability.
  • Implemented ongoing optimization recommendations to improve the quality of service.
  • Improved visibility with cost anomaly detection and budget alerts.

Prepare for the Future With Best-in-Industry Cloud Services

A U.S. nonprofit has played a crucial role in funding innovative research, lifesaving tools and information to help prevent and treat certain diseases. But it was struggling to manage growth with an aging data platform. The organization projected a significant increase in demand and incurred high cloud service provider (CSP) costs.

The organization needed infrastructure that could easily adapt to new cloud applications and technology in the long term. The technology team didn’t have the in-house expertise required to assess the many options available, but it had to make a decision.

The company chose Hitachi Vantara to facilitate its new hybrid multicloud infrastructure. Our managed service, part of Hitachi Cloud FinOps Services, continually assesses and monitors the organization’s cloud ecosystem to ensure that the infrastructure continues to evolve with cloud technology innovations. This approach allows the nonprofit to balance agility, cost and quality, and avoid sliding into an outdated, inefficient and costly environment. As a result, the organization has realized the following benefits:

• Cost visibility and continuous cost optimization.
  • Identified valuable indicators that point to new cloud operational needs.
  • Cut costs by a fifth using landing-zone accounts.
  • Optimized sensitive data detection with reserved instances deployment and cloud-watch optimization.
  • Implemented cloud-cost monitoring with cost anomaly detection and budget alerts.
  • Set up the cloud with automation for easy adoption of new applications and services moving forward.

Tame Cloud Costs Today

No matter where you are in your cloud journey, now is the time to optimize your cloud investment with solutions that address your most critical cloud challenges. With Hitachi Cloud FinOps Services supporting cloud assessment, implementation and managed service, you can improve your cloud economics for cloud cost savings and realize new efficiencies to position your organization for whatever the cloud future holds.

Learn more.

Krishnaprasath Hari is Vice President of Cloud Engineering at Hitachi Vantara.