In an era where businesses increasingly depend on the convenience and efficiency that the cloud provides, their monthly cloud usage is steadily on the rise. The process of migrating more and more workloads to the cloud can often lead to substantial expenses. Hence, the importance of creating a well-structured spending control strategy cannot be overstated for any company. This is why embracing the practice of FinOps is a crucial step in maintaining competitiveness and thriving in the future.

FinOps, coming from the words finance and DevOps, is a set of practices and principles aimed at managing and optimizing cloud spending within an organization. FinOps practices can be created around six basic principles:

• Teams need to collaborate as the cloud operates on a per-resource, per-second basis.
• Decisions are driven by business value of cloud
• Everyone takes ownership for their cloud usage
• FinOps data should be accessible and timely
• A centralized team drives FinOps
• Take advantage of the variable cost model of the cloud.

FinOps journey 

To bring financial accountability and efficiency to the cloud environment, firstly, it’s necessary to gather information to empower organizations with visibility, allocation and benchmarking over the company’s resources on the cloud. Then, companies need to optimize their cloud footprint as on-demand capacity is the most expensive. With advanced reservation planning and increased commitment, cost-saving can be realized. Lastly, continuous improvement and operations need to be introduced including measuring business alignment based on speed, quality, and cost. Any organizational success is only possible if the organization builds a culture of FinOps.

To help companies with financial accountability, optimizing costs, and improvement across all aspects of the business, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has developed Cloud Intelligence Dashboards.

Cloud Intelligence Dashboards framework

The Cloud Intelligence Dashboards are a collection of Amazon QuickSight (cloud-powered business intelligence service) dashboards. They are open-source frameworks offering visuals, insights, and querying without having to build complex solutions or share cost data with third-party companies. Through the dashboards any company can obtain a detailed view of the AWS usage and costs. They are customizable without coding or SQL skills. There are more than 100 configurable visual dashboards extracted from the data. The cost optimization dashboards withing AWS Cloud Intelligence Dashboards framework are The Cost Intelligence Dashboard (CID), Cost and Usage Dashboards Operations Solution (CUDOS) Dashboard, KPI Dashboard, Trends Dashboard, Trusted Advisor Organization (TAO) Dashboard, and Compute Optimizer Dashboard.

Benefits of using the Cloud Intelligence Dashboards:

• Organize and report your cost and usage data based on your business needs to help empower the teams to be more responsible for their budgets.
• Manage billing and access permissions to ensure having a consolidated view of the cloud expenses and appropriate guardrails to prevent overspending or misuse of resources.
• Plan and forecast cloud spending based on the expected usage and growth.
• Optimize cloud resources and pricing models.
• Easy to use and easy to understand through high-level summaries of key metrics and trends.
• They support IAM policies to control access, don’t require any agents or software installation, therefore keep all data within the AWS account.
• Obtain in-depth analyses with hundreds of pre-built visuals for different aspect of the cloud environment.
• Optimize cloud spending by providing cost analysis and recommendation, while pay only for what you use.

Learn more about the customization journey on the Cost Intelligence Dashboard Framework and AWS cost optimization from our webinar here.

Noventiq as an AWS partner

As an AWS Premier Consulting Partner with more than 100 AWS accreditations Noventiq supports customers with a carefully planned and reliable project delivery plan and deployment for any company throughout any industry. Leverage the technical expertise of our team and contact us for the details to bring financial accountability and efficiency to your cloud environment.