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SAP Value Creation on the Public Cloud: Executing Cloud FinOps

 

FinOps is a holistic cloud management strategy that aims to optimize cloud infrastructure costs and operations, creating efficiencies wherever possible and maximizing the value of every dollar your company spends in the cloud.

During my recent webinar, Selecting the Right SAP Opportunity for Value Creation, I discussed FinOps alongside other important public cloud topics, like migration vs. modernization, DevOps, and cloud migration vs. modernization.

In this second of three blog installments recapping the webinar, we’ll cover key takeaways about FinOps, including why it’s emerging as a critical business strategy and how Protera clients are achieving FinOps success (including specific use cases).

Quick Takeaways

  • Nearly two-thirds of all IT spending will be allocated to software applications in the cloud by 2025.
  • FinOps provides full IT infrastructure visibility for a more holistic view of costs and opportunities for optimization.
  • FinOps drives more agile operations by enabling real-time data insights and easy budgeting to test, experiment, and/or run pilot programs.

Why Your Business Needs Cloud FinOps

IT infrastructures are expanding, and most of it is happening on the cloud — according to Gartner, more than half of overall IT spending and two-thirds of software application spending will shift to the cloud by 2025.

As companies take on increasingly large and complex infrastructure architectures, managing cloud spend — which has always been a challenge — will become impossible without the right tools and strategies in place.

Organizations need a high-level way to manage their assets, costs, and workflows across the IT enterprise while maximizing ROI on their investments.

Enter: FinOps.

FinOps on the public cloud gives companies the capability to break down costs and spend in ways I’ve never seen before in my own career — rather than time-consuming, per-app cost analysis and breakdown, companies can use FinOps to achieve full infrastructure visibility and identify opportunities to optimize with data insights.

How Protera Customers Benefit from FinOps

Use cases for cloud FinOps are wide-ranging, and we’ve seen Protera clients achieve success in many ways by implementing it.

For example — we recently did a project with a large oil and gas company, and one of the things they found most helpful was tagging all of their resources, systems, and services to allocate them in for financial visibility and to be able to charge back individual business units. With FinOps in place, tracking costs and allocating them appropriately is automated, and relevant data is hyper-visible to everyone who needs it (in an ongoing way or for a particular project).

Speaking of individual initiatives, FinOps makes it easy to set budgets for things like testing and experimentation or pilot implementation of other ideas, ultimately enabling companies to operate with greater agility, innovation, and focus on opportunities for continuous improvement.

Our job at Protera is to focus on these types of projects (big and small) so you as the client can get the most value out of hyperscaler investments. We helped one client move non-prod backups from global redundant storage to local redundant storage and achieve $50,000 in monthly cost savings — a perfect example of how internal optimizations can free up significant funds for more strategic initiatives.

Get Started with Cloud FinOps at Your Organization

Your own FinOps journey starts with many of the same planning steps involved in any digital transformation — assembling the right team to champion your efforts, mapping your execution plan, setting goals and identifying KPIs, and getting buy-in from company leadership.

In our complete cloud FinOps guide, we walk through this process in more detail to help you execute successfully at your organization.

You can also get more complete insight on this and important related topics by listening to the full version of my recent webinar, Selecting the Right Opportunity for SAP Value Creation.

 

Finally, to learn more about how Protera can help you execute a successful journey to the cloud and implement FinOps oversight, talk to our team today.
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