In the age of AI, tech budgets are under extraordinary scrutiny. Yet too often, organizations overspend to make sure everything performs as expected. Organizations self-estimate that 24% of their software spend in the cloud is wasted — money that could be better spent on innovation, infrastructure, security, and better customer experiences.
IBM’s FinOps solutions offer a more strategic approach to cloud spending that goes beyond basic cost management. At all three phases of the FinOps lifecycle – inform, optimize, and operate – you’ll find ways to drive value for every dollar spent while also ensuring that applications get the resources they need in any cloud environment – private, public and Kubernetes. And as you adopt more cloud-native application architectures and your FinOps practice matures, our solutions can grow with you, too, offering advanced insights, forecasting and optimization.
In the Inform phase, all stakeholders are empowered with the information and understanding they need to make informed, cost-effective decisions around cloud usage.
Start with the fundamentals:
- Gather insights into multi-cloud cost and usage from CSPs
- Discover cost allocation
- See business mappings, reporting and dashboards
See how to allocate and optimize cloud resources (link resides outside ibm.com)
Then tackle more advanced tasks:
- Look at cloud program TCO and unit economics, unit costing
- Receive advanced allocation of shared costs, and profitability, chargebacks/showbacks.
See how to enable advanced allocations and unit economics (link resides outside ibm.com)
The Optimize phase helps practitioners identify opportunities for additional savings and improve cloud efficiency using the data and capabilities developed in the Inform phase.
Start with the fundamentals:
- Rightsize recommendations and preferences
- Optimize container costs
- Maximze Reserve Instances (RI)/Savings Plans (SP) and RI/SP planner
See how to allocate and optimize cloud resources (link resides outside ibm.com)
Then tackle more advanced tasks:
- Automate financial commitment instruments
- Implement application performance assurance and automated resource optimization
- Set dynamic IaaS and PaaS scaling and idle resource detection
- Continuously rightsize container, cluster and automated pod placement
See how to supercharge savings from commitment programs (link resides outside ibm.com)
In the Operate phase, practitioners evaluate performance against business objectives and look for ways to implement organizational changes to improve and operationalize their FinOps practice.
Start with the fundamentals:
- Create basic budgets and forecasting
- Implement workload planning
- Set up alerts, anomaly detection, reporting and insights
See how to allocate and optimize cloud resources (link resides outside ibm.com)
Then tackle more advanced tasks:
- Create collaborative, driver-based forecasting and planning with approval workflows
- Automate horizontal scaling for cost-effective attainment of service level objectives
- Implement continuous cluster limit and request optimization
See how to forecast and optimize future cloud costs (link resides outside ibm.com)
See how to optimize cloud and cloud-native usage with trustworthy actions
With Apptio Cloudability providing cloud cost transparency, NRECA was able to make cost-conscious spend decisions and reinvest savings to serve its customers.
Apptio Cloudability allowed TUI group to gain end-to-end cloud cost transparency, dynamic scalability and better budget tracking at the team level.
IBM Turbonomic executed over 5,800 automated resourcing actions over a 90-day period to ensure performance while saving on public cloud spend.
At all FinOps phases, gain cloud cost management and optimization across all cloud vendors to more easily tie spend to the business value delivered.
Experience automated elasticity at scale for all multi-cloud and cloud-native operations to protect performance and control spend.
Facilitate deeper cost analysis and partnership between engineering, business leaders and FinOps teams using key optimization metrics.
Apptio solutions deliver the data, insights and recommendations needed to understand and eliminate waste from your cloud spend.
IBM Turbonomic maximizes your return on IT investments, using automation that helps eliminate overspending in hybrid and multicloud environments.
Use this guide to see how a FinOps operating model can help you maximize the value of the cloud and bring your technology, business and finance teams together for greater collaboration and smarter spending.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers clients the ability to build modern, scalable applications. Explore this overview of the various methods of AWS cloud cost management—what problems they solve and how best to use them.
There’s no “one-and-done” generative AI investment. As organizations rethink business models, job roles, and workflows, they must also consider the broader IT cost implications—and not all of them are obvious.