Playbook | 4 Min Read

Executive’s Playbook is Timely for Business Challenges

Introduction

The Executive’s Playbook to FinOps and Cloud Cost Management is a timely eBook for the challenges businesses currently face. The economy is full of uncertainty and every organization wishes that it had a crystal ball. What is certain is the bottom line is more vulnerable and more important than ever.

Chief Financial Officers Focus on Cloud Cost Optimization

Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) are the leaders overwhelmingly tasked with stewardship of the bottom line. The Executive’s Playbook to FinOps and Cloud Cost Management was written primarily for CFOs, but the information it contains is useful for anyone who works in the cloud. The role of a CFO has been evolving as they seek to lead their companies to financial excellence. They are now expected to also lead in areas of technology, including cloud cost management. As Forbes notes, “Today’s CFO is a digital transformation leader with a laser focus on harmonizing revenue growth and cost optimization.”

Improve the Bottom Line

As a rule, the largest expense of nearly every organization is payroll. However, most companies’ number two expense is cloud related. Reducing cloud spend is a fruitful area to explore when companywide cost optimizations are sought. In fact, cloud cost optimization is the single most important consideration a CFO should scrutinize when assessing the business bottom line. The Executive’s Playbook to FinOps and Cloud Cost Management is a rich resource that both informs and expedites that assessment.

The Playbook

The Executive’s Playbook to FinOps and Cloud Cost Management guides you chapter by chapter as you develop your own cloud cost management program customized to your unique business needs.

What is Cloud Cost Management?

At the outset the nature of cloud cost management is examined as well as its importance in today’s challenging world marketplace. The difference between cloud cost management and FinOps is explained in the context of the available infrastructure solutions. Making the transition to an effective cloud cost management solution takes commitment but is critical to the competitive success of today’s business.

What is your Cloud Cost Management Maturity?

To make a cloud cost management decision it is necessary to have a clear understanding of the organization’s maturity. The FinOps maturity model sets out the three stages of crawl, walk and run. An organization’s current cloud cost management practice should be evaluated against industry standards to assess how much ground needs to be covered before a comprehensive cloud cost management practice is achieved. The eBook provides valuable resources that enable a maturity self-assessment. Knowing its maturity enables an organization to determine what steps need to be taken.

Questions to Ask Before You Buy

Knowing what questions to ask makes it easier to determine an organization’s readiness for cloud cost management solutions. Equip yourself with answers by asking the right questions to determine what drives your need for better cloud spend efficiencies. The insightful questions provided in the eBook create confidence that the components for implementation of a cloud cost management practice have been thoroughly considered. While every organization is unique, the checklist of foundational questions will jumpstart implementation to alleviate your organization’s pain points.

Cloud Cost Management Purchasing Myths

As might be expected myths or urban legends spring up around something as far reaching as cloud cost management. The Playbook debunks the biggest myths and exposes the truth. Savings plans, free tools and managed service providers are all placed under the microscope. Knowing the real deal facilitates making correct choices when deciding what cloud cost management solution to pursue.

Justification for a Cloud Cost Management Service Provider

An unflinching look at utilizing a managed service provider’s expertise is critical. While there is much that has been written concerning cloud cost management ultimately all roads lead to the benefits of utilizing a managed service provider. In this eBook, learn how a cloud cost management service provider can execute customized changes, provide greater visibility into your cloud spend, and respond rapidly to economic changes. Go straight to smart by leveraging your cloud experience with a managed service provider. Whether your cloud infrastructure is designed as FinOps or another cost optimization model, you will discover the savings opportunities available in cloud cost management when you enlist the expertise of a managed service provider.

Success in the Real World

The benefits of engaging a third-party service provider are described in a real-world success story. Fannie Mae, which has an annual revenue of $100.3B, and holds assets exceeding $4.2T, realized significant savings in their partnership with CloudSaver. The details of their success are elaborated in the Playbook.

Access to real world support is also found in the Playbook as it contains a plethora of secondary resources, referenced through QR codes for your convenience, providing supplementary background material and practical tools to assist you in making cloud cost management decisions.

Conclusion

Gartner reports that as of 2022 many CFOs are grappling with how to turn digital investments into wins. If your strategy is to win in the cloud, the Playbook can teach you how.

FEATURE	BENEFIT
Tag Automation & Batch Tag Processing	Employ powerful automation to quickly and accurately tag cloud resources minimizing manual tasks and saving valuable time and effort. Reduce security vulnerabilities and human errors with accurate and swift tagging.
Real-time, Native Cloud Sync	Tag changes are reflected in real-time in native cloud service provider environments. Data is timely and accurate and can be leveraged with additional CloudSaver and third-party tools.
Tag Explorer Query Engine	Utilize our patented filtering and search technology for rapid and efficient location of client data across resources, zones, accounts, and service providers. This capability drastically reduces mean-time-to-resolution by quickly identifying key cloud data. Its deep dive, robust exploration enables you to “find anything.”
Tag Intelligence Dashboards & Tools	Benefit from a guided tag health experience that automatically delivers valuable insights without the need for customized reports or dashboards. These insights cover both your entire tag environment and also specific categories.
Customizable Dashboards	Create customized dashboards to display data according to your specific needs, offering real-time visibility into cloud resources, tags and spend. Obtain timely, accurate, and relevant data for insightful analysis and to identify tagging gaps.
Efficient Tag Remediation	Benefit from suggested, spell-checked tag keys and values – detect and batch merge tag variations.
Legacy Tagging Solutions	Retroactively tag or modify tags on existing legacy resources during cloud migration, either individually or in bulk and eliminate time-consuming manual efforts for smooth integration into your cloud environment.
Multi-Tenant & Multi-Cloud	Manage every cloud data set from a single screen across resources, zones, accounts, and cloud service providers (AWS and Azure).
Tag Policy Compliance Monitoring	Ingest tag policies from native cloud environments to ensure consistent tag syntax and taxonomy.
User Role & Permission Console	Enhance security with Identity and Access Management features contained in the permissions assigned through tagging.
Configuration Management Database (CMDB) Integration	The CloudSaver platform seamlessly incorporates CMDB data related to known cloud infrastructure, offering precise control, efficient tagging, and enhanced visibility by viewing, filtering, and sorting cloud resources based on CMDB data.