If you’re working in the cloud, you’re not alone in facing challenges with scaling, optimization, and cost management. Many professionals, from startups to large enterprises, are grappling with similar issues as they leverage cloud services for their businesses.

The cloud offers incredible benefits—flexibility, scalability, and potential cost savings—but it also brings its own set of hurdles. For instance, perhaps you’ve found yourself struggling to keep track of ever-changing cloud expenses while trying to optimize usage. It’s a common pain point, regardless of your company’s size or budget. This is where cloud FinOps tools come into play, offering solutions to help businesses gain more control over their cloud costs while maximizing value.

In this guide, we’ll explore the world of FinOps tools, with a focus on DoiT’s cutting-edge solutions that are reshaping cloud cost management and working for you, instead of creating more headaches.

What is FinOps?

FinOps, short for Financial Operations, is a transformative approach to cloud financial management that goes beyond mere cost-cutting. Also often referred to as cloud cost management, it’s an operational framework and cultural corporate practice designed to maximize the business value derived from cloud investments.

At its core, FinOps promotes data-driven decision-making and fosters financial accountability across an organization, which also means that the level of collaboration across teams is (ideally) significantly increased.

And that’s a good thing. Because in the rapidly evolving cloud landscape, FinOps practices serve as a bridge between finance, technology, and other business units. It combines financial management principles with cloud engineering expertise to provide organizations with a comprehensive understanding of their cloud expenditure. This holistic approach helps businesses make informed decisions about current and future resource allocation and cost management without compromising performance, reliability, or security.

How to choose the right FinOps tools

With so many options in the market, selecting the appropriate FinOps tools can be a daunting task. However, keeping in mind the following factors can help guide you as you choose the right tools for the needs of your business:

Multicloud support

Thanks to today’s diverse cloud ecosystem, many organizations leverage multiple cloud providers to meet their specific requirements. Your FinOps tool should offer comprehensive support for all major cloud platforms, such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. This multicloud capability ensures:

• Unified visibility across your entire cloud infrastructure
• Consistent cost management practices across different cloud environments
• The ability to compare costs and performance across providers
• Simplified management and reporting for complex, multicloud architectures

Scalability

As your organization grows and your cloud usage expands, your FinOps tools need to keep pace. Look for solutions that offer:

• The ability to handle increasing volumes of usage and cost data without performance degradation
• Support for a growing number of users, teams, and projects
• Flexible pricing models that align with your organization’s growth
• Capacity to manage complex, enterprise-scale cloud environments
• Ability to maintain performance and responsiveness as data volumes increase

Customization

Every organization has unique cost management requirements and key performance indicators (KPIs). Your FinOps tools should offer those same customization options, including:

• Configurable dashboards that can be tailored to different roles and responsibilities
• Custom report creation to meet specific business needs
• Flexible tagging and categorization systems for accurate cost allocation
• The ability to define custom metrics and KPIs
• Customizable alerts and notifications based on your organization’s thresholds and priorities

Automation

Advanced FinOps tools leverage automation to streamline cost optimization processes and drive efficiency. Look for features such as:

• Automated resource rightsizing recommendations
• Intelligent reserved instance and savings plan management
• Automated tagging and cost allocation
• Scheduled reports and alerts
• Anomaly detection and cost spike identification
• Automated policy enforcement for cost control

Integration

Your FinOps tools should seamlessly integrate with your existing technology stack and workflows. Consider tools that offer:

• API access for custom integrations and data export
• Pre-built integrations with popular DevOps and ITSM (IT service management) tools
• Compatibility with your existing identity and access management systems
• Integration with financial systems for accurate budgeting and forecasting
• Support for CI/CD pipelines to incorporate cost optimization into your development process

Ease of use

It’s one thing to bring in powerful FinOps tools, but if they are difficult to use and understand, they likely won’t be popular with the broader team. To drive adoption and ensure effective utilization across your organization, a FinOps platform should be user-friendly and accessible. Look for:

• Intuitive, role-based user interfaces
• Clear, actionable insights and recommendations
• Comprehensive documentation and support resources
• Training materials and onboarding assistance
• Mobile accessibility for on-the-go cost management
• Collaborative features that facilitate communication between teams

Cost

While FinOps tools are designed to help you optimize cloud costs, the cost of the tools themselves will also need to play a part in your decision-making process. The right tool should provide a positive return on investment (ROI) by delivering cost savings that exceed its price. However, it’s important to consider the relative benefit of these tools compared to cloud-native solutions. Making these comparisons will help you determine the true value proposition of a FinOps tool and whether it offers significant advantages over the built-in capabilities of your cloud service provider.

When evaluating the cost factor:

• Compare pricing models: Some tools charge a percentage of cloud spend, while others have fixed pricing tiers or per-user costs. Analyze which model aligns best with your organization’s size and cloud usage patterns.
• Consider the total cost of ownership (TCO): Look beyond the subscription fee and factor in costs for implementation, training, and ongoing management.
• Evaluate the potential for cost savings: Assess the tool’s features and how they translate to tangible cost reductions in your cloud environment.
• Look for flexible contracts: Opt for tools that offer scalable pricing and the ability to adjust your plan as your needs change.

Remember, the most expensive tool isn’t necessarily the best, nor is the cheapest always the most cost-effective in the long run. Consider how the tool might reduce manual work and free up your team’s time, potentially offsetting its cost through improved productivity. The goal here is to find a solution that offers the right balance of features, usability, and cost-saving potential for your specific needs.

For an even deeper dive into this, check out our guide to cloud cost analytics tools, helping you tell the story of your cloud utilization from data analytics.

Capabilities of cloud cost optimization tools

Now, let’s dig into some of the more specific capabilities you should look for in a cloud cost optimization tool. These will be the core functions that will help you identify cost-saving opportunities and make informed decisions about your cloud spending.

Automated cost allocation

Automated cost allocation is used to accurately attribute cloud expenses to specific teams, projects, or cost centers. What does that mean? Well, in large organizations, multiple teams may be using the cloud and each team may have its own budget or cost center. However, without proper tracking and allocation, it’s challenging to determine how much each team is actually spending on cloud services. This can lead to overspending, especially if one team is consuming more resources than others.

Having a cloud cost allocation feature enables organizations to:

• Gain more visibility into resource usage and associated costs
• Implement chargeback or showback models for better accountability
• Identify high-cost areas and re-optimize resource allocation accordingly

Cloud budget management

Effective budget management tools help organizations set, track, and enforce cloud spending limits. This feature is especially important for organizations with strict budgets or those looking to have a better handle on their cloud expenses. Additionally, these tools can help in determining the right budget by providing benchmarks and industry comparisons, ensuring that organizations not only control their spending but also allocate appropriate resources for their cloud initiatives.

Key features include:

• Setting budget thresholds and alerts
• Real-time monitoring of cloud spend against budgets
• Forecasting future spend based on historical cost data and trends
• Providing benchmarks and recommendations for optimal budget allocation

Cloud optimization goal measurement

Once you have your budget set and automated cost allocation in place, it’s time to start optimizing your cloud resources. But how do you measure the effectiveness of these optimization efforts? This is where cloud optimization goal measurement comes into play. Largely in line with KPI tracking, it allows organizations to measure the actual impact of their cost-saving initiatives, providing insights that can help inform future decision-making and, ultimately, establishing a cloud cost optimization culture.

The benefits of cloud cost management

As we’ve discussed, implementing focused cloud cost management practices and tools yields numerous advantages for organizations. But what is the “so what?” here? After all, leadership teams need to understand the tangible benefits of investing in cloud cost management to justify spending time, resources, and money on these efforts.

You can tell them that the value of effective cloud cost management can be seen in the lifecycle of its adoption:

Enhanced cloud visibility

Comprehensive cloud cost management tools provide a holistic view of cloud usage and expenses across multiple platforms and services, enabling better decision-making and resource allocation.

Cloud cost reduction

By identifying those initial inefficiencies, eliminating and repurposing under- or non-utilized allocations, along with optimizing resource usage, organizations can significantly reduce their cloud expenses. A study by Gartner predicts that nearly all legacy applications migrated to public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) will require optimization to actually become more cost-effective. What this means is that without proper cloud cost management, organizations may actually be increasing their expenses by continuing what they’re doing in the cloud without any oversight.

Predictable cloud bills

With a cloud management strategy and action plan in place, improved visibility and forecasting capabilities can lead to more accurate budget predictions, helping organizations avoid unexpected cost spikes and plan for resources more effectively.

Freeing up revenue for reinvestment

Finally, by optimizing cloud costs, organizations can redirect savings toward innovation, product development, other strategic initiatives that drive business growth, and even a reinvestment in the cloud itself.

The best FinOps tools: DoiT’s cloud cost management solutions

DoiT offers a suite of powerful FinOps solutions designed to help organizations optimize their cloud costs and maximize the value of their cloud investments. Biases aside, here are some of the key features and capabilities that make DoiT’s cloud cost management solutions stand out:

1. DoiT Flexsave™

DoiT Flexsave™ is an innovative solution exclusively available through DoiT Cloud Advantage, designed to maximize discount coverage for AWS workloads. It aims to optimize cost savings by identifying on-demand resources that are eligible for coverage under Savings Plans and, where applicable, Reserved Instances.

The tool continuously analyzes your AWS environment, focusing on workloads not currently covered by existing commitments. By using Flexsave, organizations can increase the amount of their AWS usage that benefits from discounted pricing, particularly for EC2, Lambda, Fargate, and RDS workloads that would otherwise incur full on-demand costs.

This intelligent optimization approach helps simplify AWS cost management efforts while maximizing savings. As a result, organizations can focus more on driving business value rather than manually managing complex cloud cost structures and commitment purchases.

2. Cloud Analytics

View flexible reports on your cloud costs via DoiT Analytics.

DoiT Cloud Analytics transforms complex public cloud bills into actionable insights, enabling businesses to understand and optimize their cloud spend effectively. The tool provides a comprehensive view of cloud costs, allowing organizations to identify key cost drivers and uncover optimization opportunities.

Cloud Analytics facilitates strategic spending by accurately allocating cloud costs and measuring consumption, ensuring cloud investments align with business priorities. It also helps build organizational “cloud muscle” by sharing the story behind data-driven insights about cost drivers, encouraging teams to maintain efficiency and continually optimize their cloud usage.

3. Anomaly Detection

Detect spikes in cloud spend so you can adjust to keep your costs in check.

DoiT Anomaly Detection is a feature designed to minimize the impact of unplanned cost anomalies and ensure adherence to cloud cost budgets across your business. From cloud services to individual SKUs, it continuously analyzes billing data, alerting you to abnormal cost spikes without requiring custom configuration, thus maintaining the reliability of your budgets and forecasts.

Anomaly Detection empowers teams to anticipate unplanned spend when launching new products or features, facilitating better alignment with business goals and the creation of more cost-effective products.

4. Attributions / Attribution Groups

Organize cloud spend by attribution group in DoiT.

DoiT’s Attributions and Attribution Groups feature is a powerful tool for organizing and analyzing your cloud spend, allowing you to create custom groupings of your cloud resources based on various criteria such as projects, teams, or business units. By using Attributions, you can easily track and allocate costs across different segments of your organization, enabling more accurate budgeting and cost management. Attribution Groups provide a higher-level view, allowing you to combine multiple attributions for comprehensive cost analysis and reporting. This feature is particularly valuable for businesses with more complex organizational structures or those seeking to implement more granular cost allocation strategies.

5. Spot Scaling

Automate spot scaling with DoiT.

DoiT Spot Scaling helps you better adopt—and thus save with—Spot instances by recommending best practice configurations to your Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs). It manages the instance composition of your ASGs so that you can leverage Spot instances without worrying about interruptions. It simplifies Spot Instance implementation by eliminating complexities associated with launch templates, configurations, and mixed instance policies. To ensure uninterrupted performance, Spot Scaling automatically falls back to on-demand configurations when Spot capacity is insufficient.

By automating management and monitoring processes, Spot Scaling helps you realize significant savings with minimal effort, effectively doing away with the traditional trade-off between cost reduction and application stability.

6. BigQuery Lens

Get actionable insights to optimize both performance and cost.

DoiT BigQuery Lens offers granular insight into BigQuery usage on Google Cloud Platform, enabling cost and performance optimization without delving into complex audit logs or documentation. It provides actionable recommendations on table clustering, partitioning, storage costs, and query optimization, all without any setup required.

BigQuery Lens also helps improve BI dashboard performance, optimize scheduled queries, and manage storage costs by identifying unused tables within your Google Cloud environment.

7. DataHub

Combine your analytics in one hub for comprehensive insights and smarter business decisions.

DoiT DataHub enhances cloud cost management by allowing organizations to combine cloud spending data with internal business metrics and organizational structures. It enables the ingestion of various data types via API or CSV upload, including information that’s not typically available from cloud providers, such as organizational hierarchy and application-specific revenue.

By integrating this diverse data, DataHub generates comprehensive insights that go beyond standard cloud cost reporting. Users can view combined analytics for all costs and associated business metrics in a single, comprehensive dashboard. By bringing all relevant information together, DataHub facilitates more informed decision-making, allowing teams to track metrics that directly tie cloud spending to business value.

8. Insights

DoiT Insights provides daily refreshed, actionable recommendations to enhance infrastructure security, adopt best practices, and improve cost-effectiveness, while tracking completed optimizations to foster accountability. How does that look in practice? Imagine Insights identifying an underutilized instance type, prompting you to switch to a more cost-effective alternative while maintaining performance.

These insights are generated based on recent cloud billing data, ensuring recommendations are current and relevant to your cloud environment.

9. Threads

Streamline your workflows with DoiT Threads.

DoiT Threads is a feature that connects DoiT Cloud Intelligence™ with project management and ITSM systems like Jira, enabling users to create, manage, and track projects based on DoiT Cloud Intelligence’s™ recommendations without leaving their workflow. It streamlines the process of acting on optimization and governance recommendations by allowing users to create tickets directly from the DoiT Console, driving accountability and cost ownership among engineering teams.

Threads supports key FinOps initiatives including reducing waste, empowering engineers, and driving organizational adoption of FinOps practices. Its dashboard provides a simplified view of ongoing optimization efforts, making it easier for non-technical stakeholders to monitor progress and potential savings.

10. CloudFlow

DoiT CloudFlow, set to launch in late 2024, is a GenAI-powered, no-code platform designed to automate FinOps processes at scale. It features a user-friendly UI that enables teams to automate workflows, schedule resources, and implement automated tagging without coding skills. By putting FinOps processes on autopilot, CloudFlow aims to help organizations reduce cloud expenses more effectively and ensure ongoing compliance with internal policies and industry regulations.

Empowering cloud cost optimization with DoiT

DoiT saves cloud-native organizations thousands of dollars yearly

As organizations continue to leverage cloud technologies for innovation and growth, effective cloud cost management becomes a major focus to maintain financial health and drive business success. DoiT’s suite of FinOps tools offers a comprehensive solution for optimizing cloud costs, improving visibility, and maximizing the value of cloud investments.

Ultimately, DoiT’s FinOps tools empower organizations to take control of their cloud costs, enabling them to focus on innovation and growth rather than managing complex cloud bills.

Ready to optimize your cloud costs and accelerate your business growth? Explore how DoiT Cloud Intelligence™ can help you optimize your cloud costs and take the first step toward more efficient cloud management today.

Book a discovery call with DoiT today