Data Management Glossary
FinOps (or Cloud FinOps)
FinOps (or Cloud FinOps) means financial operations that include practices such as cost optimization, cost allocation, chargeback and showback, and cloud financial governance. Some of the key challenges that organizations face with regards to cloud costs include:
- Cost visibility: Many organizations struggle to gain complete visibility into their cloud costs, which can make it difficult to ensure that they are not overspending on resources.
- Cost optimization: Organizations need to optimize their cloud costs by reducing waste, optimizing resource utilization, and ensuring that they are only paying for what they need.
- Cost allocation: Organizations need to allocate their cloud costs so that they are charged in a way that accurately reflects the resources that they are consuming.
- Cloud financial governance: Governance processes and controls can ensure that cloud spending is aligned with their overall business goals and objectives.
Overall, FinOps is a critical aspect of modern cloud management, and is essential for organizations that want to effectively manage their cloud costs and ensure that they are maximizing value and ROI from their cloud investments.
There are several vendors that specialize in FinOps solutions for cloud cost management and cloud cost optimization, but increasingly FinOps is built into other applications and technology platforms:
- Apptio
- CloudHealth by VMware
- RightScale (acquired by Flexera)
- CloudCheckr
- Azure Cost Management + Billing by Microsoft
- AWS Cost Explorer by Amazon Web Services
- Cloudability
- ParkMyCloud
With the right Cloud FinOps strategy, organizations should focus on gaining the tools and expertise they need to manage their cloud costs and ensure that they are getting the most value from their cloud investments.
FinOps and Unstructured Data Management
How much does it cost to own your data?
Cost modeling in Komprise helps IT teams enter their actual data storage costs to determine upfront new projected costs and benefits before spending money on storage. (Know First)
Look at your current (and future) data storage platform(s). Does the company pay per GB (OPEX) or is it an owned technology (CAPEX)? For the latter, divide the current total amount of actual usable data by the cost to acquire the full system to attain cost/TB. For example, 1PB of physical storage may end up being just 500TB of actual usable capacity but only has 300TB of actual useable data on it. Use the 300TB because that is representative of today’s data ownership cost.
Data ownership should also include the cost of data protection (data backup, disaster recovery, etc.). The FinOps capabilities in Komprise Intelligent Data Management allow you to compare on-premises versus cloud models or factor in cloud tiering or migrating to a new NAS platform.
According to GigaOm’s 2022 Data Migration Radar Report: Komprise has, “the best set of Financial Operations (FinOps) features to date.”
Stop overspending on cloud storage: Know First. Move Smart. Take Control with the right FinOps for cloud data storage and data management strategy.