FinOps is a method of bringing financial accountability to the cloud’s operational expense (OpEx) spending model. This new way of handling financial operations allows distributed IT teams, development, and finance to work together to enable faster product delivery while managing and predicting costs.

FinOps is different from the traditional IT procurement capital expense (CapEx) model. Instead of finance allocating budgets to product teams, a cross-functional FinOps team coordinates technology, business, and finance to optimize cloud vendor management, service rates, and discounting. It’s all about establishing financial accountability in cloud spending.

The GigaOm report, “Key Criteria for Evaluating Financial Operations (FinOps) Tools,” outlined issues, trends, and purchase considerations for prospective customers. It identified key criteria and evaluation metrics for selecting a FinOps platform. This companion Radar report recognizes the vendors and products that excel in their FinOps offerings.

This FinOps Radar report provides a forward-looking analysis that carefully plots the relative value and progression of the various FinOps solutions available in the market. Factors such as strategy and execution are evaluated for each vendor. In addition, highlights of each offering are presented in a short summary.

The post GigaOm Radar for Evaluating Financial Operations (FinOps) Tools appeared first on Gigaom.

Hybrid clouds are either the end goal or a transition method to get to a cloud-only hosting model. A CPM vendor that can manage your on-premises automation and orchestration needs as well as the cloud hosting provides a greater value than separate tools that only do either on-premises or public cloud deployments.

More comprehensive CMP vendors also manage storage, security, disaster recovery, system health and performance, and application lifecycle management. These are just a few examples of the functions that must now be managed across multiple planes while accounting for multiple, and often differing, requirements—e.g., cloud vs. on-premises, hardware vs. software, ephemeral vs. persistent storage.

As organizations move more applications to the cloud, the need for a high-level “single view” of the entire infrastructure becomes critical to ensure uptime and high performance without compromising data mobility and security. A new role of cloud operations manager has evolved to oversee hybrid cloud deployments using CMPs. This role has evolved as a superset of responsibilities that include any lower-level roles that manage a cloud contract or data center.

There are three aspects to total cloud management:

1. Automation = CMP
2. Application performance optimization = Cloud Resource Optimization
3. Financial accountability = FinOps

This report focuses on the automation of cloud management platforms needed to support application deployments.

Figure 1: Three Aspects of Total Cloud Management

As hybrid cloud deployments are the new norm, businesses of every size are leveraging CMPs to streamline cloud migration and ongoing operational needs. Though these types of infrastructures introduce more complexity, they also create more

opportunities to deliver value, primarily by using best-of-breed solutions.

Previously, essential functions such as asset tracking and dependency maps ran in data centers with redundancy to mitigate fallout from environmental outages and ensure elevated levels of uptime. The move to cloud requires a new paradigm, however, in which “design for failure” becomes an application requirement and not the infrastructure mandate.

The fact is, today the hardware is ephemeral, and we can’t use a physical server’s asset tag to track where an application is running, which is how traditional management tools worked. The move to virtual machines (VMs) on-premises and now to the cloud means that the focus must be on the business problem or solution itself and that other attributes be treated as short-lived. CMPs can manage the types of storage and flag inconsistencies in deployment requests to policy governance to ensure the type of storage and the characteristics of storage match the business expectations and governance requirements.

A CMP’s ability to track services at a high level is critical to the multi-year management needs of IT as organizations move to hybrid and multiple clouds.

This report evaluates key vendors in the cloud management space and equips IT decision-makers with the information they need to select providers according to their specific needs. We analyze the vendors on a set of key criteria and evaluation metrics, which are described in-depth in the Key Criteria Report for Cloud Management Platforms.

The post GigaOm Radar for Cloud Management Platforms appeared first on Gigaom.

Enterprises today must deal with a wide variety of far-flung users and disparate systems, and must be able to provision and support them both, safely and efficiently, However, few enterprise IT organizations know how to manage multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments, let alone with the agility today’s businesses demand. Cloud management platforms (CMPs) enable customers to manage their complex environments more efficiently and with less cost.

Cloud management has three aspects that can be separate tools or intergrated to some level. The three areas are automation, operational optimization, and financial optimization and reporting. The names of these three groups are Cloud Management Platform, Cloud Resource Optimization, and Financial Operations (FinOps). The following graphic shows how these areas relate. This report covers Cloud Management Platforms, and GigaOm has other reports on the other two topics.

Figure 1: Three Aspects of Total Cloud Management

This Gigaom Key Criteria report details the key issues and trends to consider around the use of CMPs. Indeed, we’ll identify key criteria and evaluation metrics for selecting a management tool platform as well as identify vendors and products that excel. This report will give you an overview of the key enabling technology that can be obtained today and will help decision-makers evaluate existing platforms and decide where to invest.

The post Key Criteria for Evaluating Cloud Management Platforms appeared first on Gigaom.

However, it is important to understand first that FinOps is different from the traditional IT procurement CapEx model, in which finance identifies and signs off on costs allocated by product teams. Instead, a cross-functional FinOps team pulls together technology, business, and finance to optimize cloud vendor management, service rates, and discounting.

More than a buzzword, FinOps is supported by a formal organization (FinOps.org) that ensures the industry delivers clear solutions and consistent definitions to the process of establishing financial accountability in cloud spending.

This GigaOm Key Criteria report details the key issues and trends to consider around the use of FinOps tools. We identify key criteria and evaluation metrics for selecting a FinOps platform, and, in the companion Radar report, recognize the vendors and products that excel. We also provide an overview of the key enabling technology that can be obtained today, which can help decision-makers evaluate existing platforms and decide where to invest.

This report covers various aspects of managing the cost of a multi-cloud deployment using FinOps tools. It includes guidance on how to plan, how to pick the right technologies, how FinOps works in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments, and what processes and tools you’ll need to be successful the first time.

The post Key Criteria for Evaluating Financial Operations (FinOps) Tools appeared first on Gigaom.