Explore how a FinOps Dashboard tackles AWS financial challenges, from cost control to resource allocation, enhancing your business's financial health.
Data and analytics are essential for making business decisions. However, they're only useful if you can understand the data and how it relates to the problem you're trying to solve.
This is where dashboards are helpful.
A good dashboard visually shows various pieces of information in just one place. Companies rely on dashboards daily, from monitoring customer experience to system performance and tracking KPIs to sales opportunities.
Now, with more and more companies moving portions of their operations to the cloud, there’s a new dashboard that’s gaining prominence: The FinOps dashboard.
FinOps is short for Financial Operations, though since it deals with optimizing costs of a cloud environment, it could very easily be short for Financial Optimization.
FinOps relies on a team of members trained in specific disciplines to work together to enable their company to find the most optimal way to use their cloud service. Team members can come from operations, engineering, leadership, finance or accounting, IT, and more.
FinOps dashboards allow team members, individually or collectively, to monitor the financial performance of cloud use cases and adjust where necessary to better use company resources.
Typically, cloud dashboards are used to determine instances of overspending or underutilization. The right dashboard can answer such questions:
If you’re a customer of Amazon Web Services, there’s a company that can help you create a FinOps dashboard that leads to cloud cost optimization and significant savings—StratusGrid.
As a certified AWS Partner, StratusGrid designed the Stratusphere™ FinOps product specifically to enable AWS customers to optimize their cloud costs.
Key to the effort is the information gleaned from the Stratusphere™ FinOps dashboard. Our dashboards let you:
Get pre-built insights that offer the data and context you need to execute. No need for the creation and maintenance of custom dashboards or large complex data projects. We guide you with essential focus areas and expand as needed.
Potential savings insights are ranked by LoE so you can work on high-value projects and get rapid ROI. Instantly see what you should focus on and prioritize your to-do list for potential savings. Get accurate stack rankings of action items categorized by level of effort, verified by consultants who have seen and done it before.
Configure your benchmark targets and instantly gain valuable insights into AWS cloud usage and potential savings within your portfolio of operating companies. Then, filter down findings reports by account, region, service, and LoE to get the most specific savings insights.
Simplify data sharing across organizations and get flexibility and control without any cumbersome legal processes. Operating companies can now create separate instances within our app, get valuable insights, and maintain full data ownership while sharing data with managing organizations to allow unique insights and better understand relative performance.
Cloud costs come from any number of sources, from within a company’s own departments to an organization’s many companies. Without a comprehensive cost-optimization tool or a FinOps team in place, tracking them is difficult at best.
Fortunately, Stratusphere™ FinOps is equipped to help you easily handle the following issues:
TL;DR
It’s often difficult to obtain detailed information about cloud spending, and companies struggle to fully comprehend the complexities of cloud pricing and billing.
The Stratusphere™ FinOps dashboard offers detailed insights into AWS cloud usage and potential savings, helping with cost visibility and granularity. See a full breakdown of your cloud usage costs–down to the dollar–so you can understand trends and uncover opportunities to maximize your savings.
Lack of clear insight into accounts prevents actions that could gain you cost savings.
The Stratusphere™ FinOps solution confidently navigates your AWS infrastructure with unparalleled visibility into complex cloud environments, with no impact on first-party data ownership. Our dashboard allows for report filtering by account, region, service, etc., enhancing visibility that can lead to potential savings.
Every company wants to make a healthy return on any investment. With cloud services taking up a greater percentage of your company’s spending, how can you accurately quantify your ROI on a FinOps investment?
Stratusphere™ FinOps by StratusGrid has helped hundreds of companies migrate to the cloud and optimize their cloud costs. In fact, with Stratusphere™ FinOps, users have averaged 15X ROI.
With unclear cloud usage, it’s difficult to determine who is responsible for ownership and costs.
Our dashboard can break down costs and provide detailed reports that help achieve transparent and fair cost allocation. Customizable access and detailed cost breakdowns can also clarify accountability and ownership.
Managing cloud expenses that are variable and sometimes unpredictable can significantly strain your IT budget. Experiencing "bill shock" from unexpected cloud costs can substantially impact financial planning.
Stratusphere™ FinOps’s predictive analysis feature can anticipate future costs, helping address issues with unpredictable spending.
Engineering wants the best product, and finance wants the best price. A disconnect between departments can put a project at risk due to missed deadlines, over budget, or failure to satisfy market demands.
Tailored for finance professionals, the Stratusphere™ FinOps dashboard offers easy data sharing, which encourages fact-based discussions and helps bridge the collaboration gap between teams.
Whether you underutilize resources or provision more than you need, the result is cloud waste.
Stratusphere™ FinOps’s insights into usage and cost can help you identify underutilization or overprovisioning. Such information leads to optimization opportunities that can significantly reduce cloud spending.
Failing to govern and comply adequately with cost-related policies from the start dooms those policies, leading to inefficient use of cloud resources.
Stratusphere™ FinOps’s comprehensive features, such as our analysis view and commitment-based view, support implementing an efficient FinOps model that standardizes cost-saving policies and allows you to identify potential savings across your AWS accounts in seconds.
Effectively managing relationships and negotiations with different cloud service providers can be a complex task. As organizations grow and their needs evolve, they often find that native cloud management tools no longer suffice. This can lead to challenges in maintaining efficient operations and optimizing cloud expenditures.
While native tools offer a baseline utility for smaller workloads or occasional use, they often fall short when it comes to managing larger applications or providing deep, actionable insights. For instance, understanding unit costs—a critical aspect of cloud cost optimization—can be elusive with these basic tools.
This gap highlights a need for more sophisticated tools in cloud cost management.
Stratusphere™ FinOps transcends the capabilities of native AWS cost tools and offers a more nuanced and detailed approach to cloud cost management. Stratusphere™ FinOps is designed to cater to the complexities of larger applications and to deliver insights that go beyond the surface level. By leveraging our platform, you can gain a granular understanding of your cloud expenditures, enabling precise cost allocation and informed decision-making.
For a deeper dive into how Stratusphere™ FinOps stands out from AWS's native cost optimizer and other tools, check out our blog: How is Stratusphere™ FinOps Different from AWS Native Cost Optimizer?
Diverse and integrated cloud infrastructures often present visibility challenges. The more complex the cloud infrastructure is, the more complex it becomes to optimize all instances without turning into a time-consuming data project.
With Stratusphere™ FinOps, cloud usage, and cost data are consolidated into one tool. You can understand current costs and optimization potential and relative performance between account organizations and performance over time for an organization.
Attaining a level of cloud cost optimization is one thing and a huge first step. But what about maintaining the optimization of your cloud services over time?
Stratusphere™ FinOps’s dashboard provides insights and predictive analysis that allow for continuous optimization, even across a multi-company landscape. Our Level of Effort feature informs what savings are readily achievable versus those that require deeper analysis or re-architecture. Stratusphere™ FinOps categorizes and prioritizes these findings right out of the box.
With ever-present, fluctuating cloud service demand, it’s often difficult to accurately predict and plan for future cloud spending.
Our dashboard’s ability to help you visualize predictive analytics based on current data trends can greatly improve forecasting accuracy. Benefit from data-driven insights that identify opportunities and potential pitfalls.
With so many cloud service stakeholders, establishing clear roles and responsibilities can be challenging. This can lead to confusion in direction, overspending or underprovisioning, or project slowdowns.
The Stratusphere™ FinOps dashboard allows you to customize access permissions to optimize communication, eliminate cross-purpose decision-making, and help define stakeholder hierarchies.
The best decisions are fact-based. However, if pertinent data is difficult to obtain and understand, important decisions may be delayed or misinformed.
With Stratusphere™ FinOps, your customized dashboard can provide insights you can readily act upon and data-driven analysis, which can help you better develop reliable cloud cost intelligence.
It only makes sense that every company would want to optimize the cost of their cloud services. The question becomes what’s the best way to efficiently and effectively do this?
With Stratusphere™ FinOps, companies receive ranked recommendations on achieving the most savings with the least effort. Such prioritization helps you set reachable goals and a viable action plan.
Monitoring key cost metrics in a collaborative setting and shared environment is challenging. Without accurate information, any cost-saving plan is incomplete or even faulty.
Our dashboard offers detailed tracking and reporting features for cloud usage and expenses. You’ll have the ability to filter by company and account level while maintaining data ownership with our data-sharing capability. Finance-optimized features like the Analysis View help finance and leadership teams better understand cloud costs and participate in the planning and management process.
Onboard Stratusphere™ FinOps with no strings attached. Access unlimited functionality with advanced features. You can cancel anytime (though chances are you won’t want to). And there’s no credit card required. You have nothing to lose and cloud cost optimization to gain.
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