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Optimise your Cloud: maximising your business value whilst minimising your growing cloud costs

July 5, 2024

The cloud is changing every business in the world but a poll of financial professionals found that 60% are worried about cloud costs being significantly higher than planned, with many complaining about costs running out of control.

In fact, typically 15-25% of cloud spend can be removed, by applying pragmatic controls.

I am not talking knee-jerk cost-cutting or arbitrary cost-caps as these can severely impact the organisational capabilities to deliver to their organisations and customers, removing much of the cloud competitive advantage.

Instead, applying a systematic approach to minimising the costs while ensuring the organisation gets the maximum financial value the cloud can offer is paramount in todays economic climate.

To achieve this, we need to look at what the cloud is being used for, how it is being used, when it is being used, and what financial implications are attached to the usage.

Using this information, we need to then either define or refine our cloud policies and governance, not just to make changes for today but also to ensure that going forward finance, business, and operational needs are all considered when changes are being made to how the organisation is utilising the cloud.

To do this successfully, a change needs to be made in how the organisation thinks and uses the cloud because by everybody in the organisation taking ownership, the costs and priorities are easier to define and manage.

Thus quality tooling and reporting should be used to enforce these policies and manage exceptions, as this is the key route to ensure quality delivery of cost management.

This holistic approach to finance, business need and IT operations is called FinOps, and we at Black Marble can guide you in the right direction.

At Black Marble, our renowned team of cloud specialists have helped many customers deliver world class solutions since the early days of Microsoft Azure, and can assist in your successful adoption of the cloud, including guidance on optimising your usage and spend.

Join our webinar on Reducing your Azure Cloud Costs with Essential FinOps to find out more, and to have the opportunity to ask our experts directly what you need to do.