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Mastering cloud:
cost, agility, quality.

You’ve invested in on-demand cloud consumption, so you should be cutting costs. But it’s not always straightforward. Without good enterprise visibility and the ability to accurately forecast your consumption of cloud services, you may well find costs quickly spiral out of control.

Discover how a cloud FinOps cross-functional approach can help you strike the right balance between cost, agility and quality.

Address cloud complexity, optimize resources, increase your skillsets, lower your total cost of ownership, and maximize the value of your cloud investments through a more granular view of your cloud costs and needs.

Harvard Business Review Analytic Services Report

Balancing cloud costs and business goals with FinOps.

The latest in-depth Harvard Business Review Analytic Services Report
asks why so many enterprises struggle to keep a handle on cloud costs.
It includes opinions and insights from leading FinOps analysts and the FinOps Foundation. Plus it offers practical guidance based on a detailed survey of over 260 executives who are familiar with their organization’s
cloud adoption.

These expert recommendations will help you create your own culture
of total cost optimization.

Balancing cloud costs and business goals with FinOps Balancing cloud costs and business goals with FinOps

Many enterprises struggle to properly manage
cloud costs...they miscalculate their cloud
needs and how best to optimize resources.

Harvard Business Review Analytic Services Briefing Paper: Balancing cloud costs and business goals with FinOps

What do enterprises expect
from cloud?

0%

increased agility

0%

cost reductions

Why FinOps?

Take the complexity out of controlling your cloud spend, across
public, private or
hybrid cloud. Bring tech, ops & finance teams
around one table. And align all costs to
specific business goals –
even across multiple cloud service providers:

Improved
visibility

Reduced cloud costs and business risks

Increased collaboration and accountability

Prioritizing cloud – how
soon do you start?

Organizations everywhere report they’re moving their
applications to cloud as a
matter of priority*

0%

Say cloud is very or extremely important
for future strategy
and growth

0%

Say at least 40% of infrastructure and
apps will be in the
cloud by 2022

0%

Seek increased
business agility
from cloud
investments

Take the quiz to
assess how
cloud
savvy you are

Question 1 of 3

Are all your teams on the same
page when it comes to cloud
consumption and spend?

Yes No

That’s fantastic.

Ensuring all your stakeholders are all fully on board and communicating, with the same
goals, mission and approach, is the best possible start.

But to be really cloud smart, you need
to ensure you have a fully integrated view of all
your
cloud operations, whether public, private or hybrid. You want to ensure business,
technical
and financial leaders are fully collaborating – and ready to move in a unified
direction.

So keep moving towards a unified cloud strategy. Harvard Business Review Analytic
Services cites it as key to avoiding what they call ‘the cloud cost paradox’.

Next Question Go back

You’re not alone.

The Harvard Business Review Analytic Services report outlines high-velocity decision making as an area that holds many organizations back from cloud success, and encourages needless expense.

The truth is, without a unified way to assess your cloud investments across the business,
you’re likely to find cloud becomes unmanageable, costly and overly complex.

To start benefitting from optimized cloud economics, you would do well to look into how FinOps might work help you improve communications, encourage collaboration and reinvent your processes – with incredible outcomes.

Next Question Go back

Question 2 of 3

Could you accurately predict,
forecast and budget your cloud consumption for the next 12 months?

Yes No

This is great.

The chances are, you’re already using some form of FinOps modelling,
enabling you to distribute cloud purchasing rights to all the right agents within
the organization – without allowing cloud costs to spiral out of control.

However, you might still benefit from unified visibility of your entire cloud
environment, giving you the ability to access, analyze, and act on all the data
you receive centrally. Providing real-time insights to the whole business.

Next Question Go back

Don’t stall now.

While moving your apps to cloud may well have given IT more agility, flexibility, and
responsiveness, you could be suffering the classic symptom of cloud becoming a
“runaway train”.

If you’ve been truly successful at implementing a digital-first innovation-led mindset
throughout the organization, the need for increased FinOps is now urgent. Harvard
Business Review Analytic Services confirms that 60% of organizations now demand
increased agility while 51% seek out cost reduction.

In fact, with FinOps, you have a powerful framework for bringing escalating cloud
costs under control, while enabling all the innovation and flexibility that cloud allows.

Next Question Go back

Question 3 of 3

Does your cloud planning happen
once a year, in one sitting?

Yes No

Sounds great so far.

But how far have you managed to build a fully functioning cloud center of
excellence? As this report outlines, the real challenge for IT teams is to proactively
design and build systems that will continue to meet your business objectives at
every market turn.

Read the report to learn more – and discover what true financial control and digital
flexibility look like.

Next Go back

You’re not alone.

It’s completely understandable that your financial digital planning is something
that you have to return to time and again, responding to every move in the market.

But there is a way to be responsive, flexible and to closely manage costs and
finances. The real challenge for today’s IT teams, as this report shows, is to
proactively design and build systems that will continue to move to meet your
business objectives, without being pulled in different strategic directions at every
turn.

Next Go back

FinOps – the pinnacle of cloud management

Wherever your organization is right now,
you’ll benefit from a deeper understanding of cloud economics and usage. Get real-time insight to empower improved business decisions, targeting the right customers with the right messages and solutions, at the right time.

Discover how you can strengthen your business performance by optimizing cloud spend and empowering your business units to stay
agile in today’s fast-paced digital world.

Download Report

Harvard Business Review Analytic Services Report

Balancing cloud costs and business goals with FinOps.

  • Take the complexity out of controlling
    public, private and hybrid cloud costs
  • Align costs to business goals
  • Drive cloud value by better balancing
    costs, speed, and quality
Download Report
Harvard Business Review Analytic Services Report Harvard Business Review Analytic Services Report

Harvard Business Review
Analytic Services webinar:
Balancing Cloud Costs and
Business Goals With FinOps.

Looking for guidance on how to implement a practical cost-management approach to cloud, using FinOps? In this interactive webinar, experts from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services and Hitachi Vantara share their insights on cloud adoption, and the value of FinOps. Learn how you can use FinOps to overcome the biggest challenges of cloud, and maximize the value.

Krishnaprasath Hari

Vice President, Cloud Engineering
Hitachi Vantara

Krishnaprasath leads the Global Cloud Engineering Practice at Hitachi Vantara. He brings over 20 years’ experience in Cloud & Infrastructure Services Delivery and Transformation to the role, and is passionate about designing, transforming and delivering business-oriented IT functions through Cloud, DevSecOps, AIOps and SRE.

He’s helped to deliver successful enterprise cloud transformation programmes in sectors including Media, Telecom and Manufacturing, in the US, APAC and EMEA.

Continue your journey
to modernization.

Whichever way you choose to do it, cloud and application modernization is the way to go. Now you’ve started the adventure towards a high performing digital core, you’re closer than ever to continuous innovation.

Discover why having the right partner means everything.

*Source: Harvard Business Review Analytic Services survey, September 2020

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