Intelligent Cost Optimization Platform

As of 2023, 94% of companies use cloud services. Migrating has many upsides. Scaling is more accessible; you can save money by leaving on-prem and have more control. There is one big con, though (navigating cloud migration difficulties aside): Managing a cloud environment is a full-time job. And that’s just one cloud environment! Suppose your company is working with a multicloud environment, optimizing usage and costs, and monitoring output/input while juggling security. In that case, you're looking at an entire cloud team. Simplify things with cloud optimization tools. What is cloud cost management? Cloud cost management is the practice of ensuring your cloud cost budget doesn’t get out of hand. It is a FinOps budget's best friend, helping you reduce expenses while increasing returns. It does this by tracking resource usage, setting alerts for overspending, and identifying opportunities to save. Cloud management platforms help companies manage and maintain private, public, multi-cloud single, hybrid, or fully cloud environments. A typical tool will provide automated dashboards to improve team efficiency and track spend changes and updates. Cloud management and optimization tools appeal to IT and FinOps teams because they help address data breaches and cyberattacks, and they appeal to finance because of how much you can save on budget. How do you manage cloud costs? Effective cloud cost management requires ensuring that all tools stay within profitable limits (not as easy as it sounds!). You also need to monitor labor costs to implement optimization suggestions and commitment choices based on market prices. Then, cloud cost management falls to the wayside because no one has time. That's where cloud optimization tools come into play. How to pick the best cloud optimization tool Consider the following when reviewing cloud optimization tools: Performance monitoring, so no resource is sapping the budget and that all tools perform optimally. Clarifying reporting to help you and your team understand where your spend goes when you work in the cloud. Bolstering security safeguarding your user data. Easy integration with third-party tools or AWS, GCP, Azure, or other cloud platforms. Automation of simple tasks to improve team efficiency. You don’t always need to have someone manually do those data pulls! Ease of use and a low learning curve so anyone on your team can learn to navigate dashboards and reports. Scalability so your cloud management platform can grow with your company. Budget-friendly pricing so you can add some dollars back into your yearly budget. While these are the main benefits we recommend, a great cloud optimization tool will include all of this, plus more. With that in mind, here are the optimization tools to make your time in the cloud more efficient across all services. Top cloud management tools #1: Anodot With its cloud monitoring tools, Anodot can cut your annual cloud spend in real time by up to 40%. Worldwide, Fortune 500 companies and SMBs use its proactive AI and ML-powered analytics. Anodot’s next-gen alert system makes identifying overspending and saving opportunities easy. Anodot's cloud cost management customers report an 80% faster problem detection time, a 30% reduction in incident costs, and a 90% decrease in alert noise.  In other words, we make your budget happy because of all the money you save on cloud spend! As your cloud monitoring tool means you can count on:  Complete autonomous management makes it easy to detect anomalies, forecast budgets, and receive optimization recommendations in one place.  Integration with a vast monitoring system that uses easy-to-make personalized dashboards so you can track unit economics and spending without breaking a sweat.  FinOps' expertise eliminates lengthy on-boarding time, so you can start saving ASAP.  Maximizing your multicloud experience by empowering your team to access and analyze 100% of your data, so the big and little picture always informs your decisions.  Budget-friendly prices and excellent customer service make it easy for you to grow.  Identifying and resolving problems before customers even know they exist. Total control of your multicloud with a single turnkey solution tool.  With Anodot, you can get personalized FinOps insights to optimize your multicloud, SaaS, and K8s cost vulnerabilities. Take advantage of cost-saving auctions, improve efficiency, and forecast your budget.  Ready to save up to 40% on cloud costs? Request a demo to get started today. #2: Apache Cloudstack Apache Cloudstack is a versatile and easily scalable IaaS (infrastructure as a service) source platform. This cloud optimization tool is known for its robust resource provisioning features, cloud configuration automation, VM management capabilities, and easy-to-use API. Its most enormous appeal is how easy it is to build, deploy, and manage cloud service infrastructure. Cloudstack’s free, open-source version is highly appealing for those looking to get started with cloud optimization tools. Its ability to automate cloud configuration, provide on-demand EC2 setup services, and provide end-user resource provisioning makes it an appealing option. But suppose you’re an enterprise looking for a cloud management tool that will really help you save on budget. In that case, you’re probably better off with Anodot. (Especially if you’re a FinOps organization!) #3: Apptio Cloudability A subset of IBM, Apptio Cloudability is one of the best tools to empower your IT, FinOps, and DevOps teams. Its ability to visualize and simplify visibility, optimization, and cloud management is top-notch. Its tools are specially made with FinOps in mind, focusing on cloud spending to help with cost visualization and budgeting. A big con for Apptio Cloudability is its weaker anomaly detection tools. Its user support and linking cost charges are also weaker than other cloud optimization tools. #4: AWS Cloudwatch CloudWatch is an AWS monitoring service that can integrate with over 70 popular AWS services. This cloud optimization tool lets you get in-depth insights into operation health, resource utilization, and performance. Expect customized dashboards, notifications, alarms, debugging resources, and in-depth monitoring and managing features. That's not to say there are no drawbacks with CloudWatch. Configuration can be complex, and new users' learning curve is steep. Though it can monitor on-premises and other cloud services, CloudWatch partners better with AWS. #5: Azure Management Tools Azure Management tools is the second most popular cloud service provider (just behind Amazon) for good reason. Expect a complete cloud management suite with tools to help you monitor and manage your cloud infrastructure and applications. You can use this platform on-premises in Azure cloud or a hybrid environment. Features include infrastructure monitoring, resource provisioning, threat detection, task automation, and app updates. Azure Management tools’ greatest appeal is their ability to unify—get all the necessary tools in one place! Its biggest unappealing feature is its learning curve, which can be daunting, especially for those new to cloud management. And good news! If you’re looking to beef up your Azure FinOps toolset, Anodot provides advanced anomaly detection so you can easily optimize your Azure cloud finances. #6: CloudBolt CloudBolt unites DevOps, IT, FinOps, and SecOps teams with a distinctive framework. It is collaboratively addressing cloud optimization challenges by sharing functionalities. These automated tools aid in governing your cloud platform collectively. Renowned for its user-friendly interface, this platform simplifies tasks ranging from plugin development to server deployment to task decommissioning. Though CloudBolt is the ideal tool for streamlining processes, it takes work to integrate with other platforms. #7: CloudCheckr CloudCheckr is a cloud optimization and management tool that provides end-to-end cloud coverage and helps lower costs while improving security, compliance, and cloud resource usages. With this cloud management platform, you can review individual service costs across the entire AWS environment and use that data to forecast future charges. If you use AWS Spot, CloudCheckr offers Spot-focused products like Spot Ocean (Containers), Spot Echo (Cloud Cost Optimization), Spot Elasticgroup (Infrastructure), and Spot Portfolio (CloudOps). Cloudcheckr's con is data inaccuracies, as its reports are said to sometimes need to be corrected. It’s also not the fastest tool and has a higher learning curve than other cloud management tools. #8: CoreStack CoreStack is an AI-powered next-generation multi-cloud SaaS platform that helps businesses manage the cloud at scale. This cloud management and optimization tool is known for its ease of use, user-friendly dashboards, and cybersecurity detection. Features include cloud-native technology, cost anomaly detection, and cloud cost and compliance recommendations. CoreStack is not the best integration solution. Reviews speak to CoreStack’s limited ability to interface with other APIs and tools. #9: Densify Densify, or Intel Cost Optimizer, will automatically optimize your Kubernetes resources and configure cloud instances. This cloud optimization tool uses Machine Learning to analyze workloads and cloud providers, constantly working to ensure everything is cost-optimized. Its platform can run on multiple cloud services or a multicloud or hybrid environment. Expect alerts for any over-allocation of resources or inefficient utilization of tools. Common Densify cons include performance issues and low utilization for overly large or wasteful instances. #10: IBM Cloud Orchestrator IBM Cloud Orchestrator can be your go-to cloud infrastructure platform. This tool supports quick, secure monitoring, cloud environment backups, and optimization with end-to-end service deployment across platform layers. Key features include cloud usage statistics, extensive dashboards, and configuration automation. IBM Cloud Orchestrator is known for providing a flexible and consistent cloud integration platform and tools to help you manage your IT stack. This tool’s main drawback is IBM keeps a copy of everything stored in the cloud, meaning if you delete something on your end, IBM will still keep a copy. #11: Morpheus Data Morpheus Data is an agnostic cloud optimization platform tool, meaning it helps unify your toolset and standardize your processes across a multi-cloud environment. A flexible and scalable tool, Morpheus Data can integrate with public cloud tools like Azure, GCP, and AWS, with on-prem environments like VM, and even tools like Terraform and ServiceNow. Built with self-servicing VMs, container-based, and other bare metal application services, this cloud management tool can significantly boost DevOps teams. Some key features include one-click provisioning, FinOps-specific analytics and reporting tools, and automatic logging. Morpheus Data has drawbacks like a clunkier user interface and a steep learning curve, so beginners, beware! #12: OpenStack OpenStack is an open-source cloud optimization platform for IaaS (infrastructure as a service). Using APIs or dashboards it helps you govern your networking, storage, and computing resources. Features include fault and service management, networking-as-a-service, object and block storage, VM management, and more. Since OpenStack is an open-source platform, it's free! This has the obvious pro of saving budget, though the main drawback is a lack of support since you're not paying for a product. It also means your team has to be much more hands-on, with the customer support expected with a paid feature absent. #13: Spot by NetApp Spot by NetApp is a cloud management and optimization tool for engineering and FinOps teams. Its standout feature is its automation abilities. You can easily automate cost control applications and optimization tools, like container installations. Optimization recommendations are easy to implement. Spot makes identifying cost-saving opportunities to help scale workloads and automate cloud cost control easy. Spot's main drawbacks are a lack of resource scheduling guidelines and cost vagueness. Though Spot provides cloud cost granularity for the account and sub-account levels, there aren't any unified views of multi-cloud costs. #14: Terraform Terraform is the ideal cloud optimization and management tool for automation. Known for its ability to automate updates, backups, creation, and more, it's a great time-saving cloud management tool platform. Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as a code (IaaC) tool that makes it easy to manage and establish clusters across cloud providers, making it a popular DevOps pick. Key features include Kubernetes and remote state management, virtual images, network infrastructure, and the ability to codify and provision multi-cloud architecture. You can start using Terraform for free, though you can only onboard a small team and access a limited set of tools. Different versions of Terraform, like Terraform Enterprise and Terraform Cloud Business, enable you to scale by letting you onboard larger teams and access more complex environments. Terraform has a steeper-than-average learning curve and requires regular maintenance. #15: Zesty Zesty uses an AI model to provide automated cloud cost optimization solutions. It provides precise real-time cloud resource forecasts for CPU cores, storage, and more. It uses these predictions to resize storage volumes or procure or offload public cloud instances. Zesty's cloud optimization tool's primary weakness is that it only covers EC2 instances. Reduce cloud platform budgets Anodot’s with cloud optimization tools Determine how much ROI you’re getting from the cloud with an easy-to-use report and data down to the hour – and retention periods up to 18 to 24 months. Anodot’s cloud cost management tools mean your FinOps company can get all the info you need in one place, with one tool. Cloud budget optimization has never been easier. Anodot works closely with your FinOps team to identify and optimize cloud irregularities. Our tools can integrate seamlessly with your current tech stack, making saving up to 40% on cloud spend easy. Need proof of concept? Talk to us for more insight into cloud usage, costs, and how much you can save with Anodot’s tools.

We're back with this year's cloud cost report. This time around, we're mixing things up a bit. Don't worry. You'll still get an in-depth look at cloud cost in the FinOps industry, but you'll get more insights with our data-driven results from leading reports and Anodot's customers. If you're already reaching out to grab that report, you can find it here. If you're interested in a sneak peek, here's a quick preview of what our 2024 report has in store. Current Trends in Cloud Costs What should FinOps expect this year? Top industry leaders share their insights on the 2024 cloud cost landscape. FinOps Foundation 2024 State of FinOps Report For the first time, reducing waste and managing commitments have emerged as the primary priorities for FinOps practitioners across all spending tiers. Nearly half of the practitioners highlighted the need for organizational alignment and executive buy-in to tackle their challenges effectively. Prioritizing automation has become one of the top three focus areas across all spending tiers. Organizational focus is directed towards improving budget granularity, communication, forecast accuracy, and budget adherence, with almost 57% of respondents seeking enhancement. The impact of AI/ML costs on FinOps practices is becoming evident, with 31% of all respondents and 45% of large spenders ($100M+ annual cloud spend) acknowledging its influence. Challenges include the rapid escalation of AI costs, allocation of shared AI expenses, and correlating AI costs with business outcomes. Flexera  2024 State of the Cloud Report Optimizing current cloud usage and transitioning more workloads to the cloud are high priorities for organizations across all usage levels. Managing cloud expenses has emerged as a significant challenge, surpassing security concerns. While the self-reported wasted cloud spending on IaaS and PaaS has decreased to 27% from a peak of 35% in 2022, only half of organizations have a dedicated FinOps team for cloud cost optimization. Despite economic uncertainties, cloud cost optimization precedes most organizations' sustainability. A large percentage of respondents, 85%, utilize GenAI cloud services to varying extents, with 25% extensively, 38% in experimental stages, and 22% using them sparingly.  Intel Granulate State of Cloud Optimization 2024 report In 2024, the primary objective is prioritizing cloud spend management, followed by security and compliance. Many teams need to regularly review their cloud expenditures, with nearly half of respondents reporting quarterly or annual reviews, at 30.5% and 16.7%, respectively. Installing microservices leads to increased costs, with containers and Kubernetes identified as the most expensive and challenging-to-optimize workloads. So, what patterns are we seeing from these reports? In 2024, the FinOps team will prioritize cloud spend management, security, and compliance. Many teams need to regularly review their cloud expenditures, and adopting microservices leads to increased costs, with containers and Kubernetes identified as the most expensive and challenging-to-optimize workloads. Identifying current trends can be an eye-opener, showing what your FinOps colleagues prioritize in the cloud. Now that you know what to prepare for, how can you optimize for success? We'll show you what our customers are doing!   How Anodot Customers Maximize Their Cloud Investments Giving tips on managing cloud costs is one thing, but when you’ve got real data to back it up, that's what counts! Here’s how our customers are cutting down their cloud expenses. Controlling Cloud Spend Anodot customers are witnessing a trend to brag about: their cloud footprint is expanding, yet their monthly expenditures are consistently declining! How? This happens because our clients actively use advanced platforms to give clear advice on using the cloud better and save money simultaneously. These tools don't just aim to reduce expenses; they empower businesses to extract maximum value from the cloud. They facilitate timely, informed decisions and instill a culture of financial accountability. Impacts As a result, even as these customers scale up their operations and migrate additional workloads to the cloud, they're achieving a notable reduction in their cloud costs, seeing a consistent downward trend month over month and year over year. Cloud usage & cost optimization As mentioned before, a key goal for FinOps in 2024 is to optimize cloud usage and costs. This means smartly designing infrastructure to maximize efficiency. Anodot revealings When analyzing cloud usage and cost data, Anodot's AI engine generates recommendations for workload and rate optimization. In 2022, workload and rate optimizations were equally prevalent in recommendations, but by 2023, workload optimizations took the lead, constituting over 90% of recommendations. Impacts Anodot's AI engine significantly shifts towards workload optimizations; companies implementing FinOps must focus more on designing efficient infrastructures. This indicates a move towards smarter cloud management strategies, ensuring that resources are used more effectively, ultimately leading to cost savings and enhanced operational efficiency. Realized savings opportunities Anodot users looked for ways to cut costs without losing the benefits they get from their cloud investments. The Numbers 2022 witnessed the completion of about 60% of the recommendations, which soared to nearly 90% in 2023, marking a significant 55% increase! Impacts There's a clear shift happening where the main focus is now on cutting down waste and managing commitments better. These have become the top priorities for FinOps practitioners at every spending level. Most impactful optimizations Which of our customers followed our advice for efficient cloud operations? In 2023, FinOps practitioners put over 90% of Anodot's optimization tips into practice. 5 most implemented optimizations Ebs-unattached, ec2-stopped-instance, ip-unattached, ebs-outdated-snapshot, and cloudtrail-duplicate-trails were the top optimizations by FinOps practitioners, making up nearly half of all completed optimizations. Ebs-unattached was the most impactful, contributing to over half of the savings, a significant increase from 33.75% last year. The other top optimizations accounted for less than 13% of total savings. Impact These results show that zeroing in on certain tweaks, like dealing with unattached EBS volumes and shutting down EC2 instances, can really cut down organizational costs. It’s pretty eye-opening that the unattached EBS volumes accounted for more than half of the savings, showing how much money these optimizations can save. This also points to a growing trend of getting savvy with FinOps practices, especially since we’re seeing more savings from these optimizations than last year. Companies focusing on these areas can manage their cloud resources and costs way more effectively. Looking Ahead: Predictions for Cloud Costs So, what's next for cloud tech and FinOps? Here's a quick look at our thoughts and what our customers are saying about the latest in managing cloud costs. Anodot's perspective After reviewing our customer's data and the opinions of top experts, we think the future of managing cloud costs will definitely involve AI innovations and a few challenges.  Our viewpoint We expect business leaders in 2024 to prioritize predictability in the face of economic uncertainties. They are turning to accurate forecasting and strict budget adherence to stabilize variable cloud spending. The evolution of AI-powered FinOps is opening new opportunities through chat-based assistants and analytics, elevating maturity, and addressing talent challenges. Despite facing AI/ML cost rises, cloud inflation, and resource scarcity, the need to optimize cloud costs and automate code with human oversight is becoming more critical amidst global chip shortages. Our partners' perspective  CyberArk predictions AI-driven FinOps is set to shape cloud decision-making by leveraging data insights and automation. It will be crucial to integrate FinOps with key roles like Architect, Sales, and Security. Automation will streamline data collection and enhance day-to-day FinOps tasks. Organizations will prioritize business continuity, with FinOps becoming a non-functional requirement akin to security and compliance. Aligning FinOps with efficient resource utilization and security will be vital for a comprehensive solution in the evolving operational landscape. Terasky predictions Gen-AI and FinOps are set to revolutionize infrastructure management, enhancing cloud efficiency. The evolution of FinOps necessitates more maturity in its operational phase, while Gen-AI is poised to assist companies in implementing best practices for new workloads. A comprehensive approach involving a mix of tools and solutions is vital for efficient FinOps services. Platforms are expected to offer automated processes that drive recommendations into action. Collaboration with a solutions integrator can further optimize cloud operations and enhance key performance indicators.   Get our in-depth analysis and what our partners think about FinOps future in our report! Final thoughts 2024 is shaping up to be a big year for FinOps and cloud tech. With Gen AI on the rise, companies are getting a clearer picture of their spending than ever before. With that in mind, monitoring often gets overlooked, so definitely make it a priority in your use. (There's a lot of money to be saved!) From what we've seen, our customers are making proactive steps on FinOps based on our insights and recommendations. Our platform focuses on reducing unnecessary cloud costs and streamlining operations; our data supports this! Woo! Remember its just a quick snapshot, though! Our full report dives deep into our data, offers forecasts from our customers, and highlights the must-knows from the latest FinOps reports. Check it out and here's to a fantastic 2024 in the cloud!

Companies are investing heavily in the cloud for the operational and financial benefits. But without a robust cloud cost management strategy in place, the complexity of cloud services and billing can to overspending and unnecessary cloud waste. Being able to accurately predict future cloud spend is one way to more optimize cloud spend and inform budgets. Ideally, finance, engineering and executive leadership agree upon and build allocation and forecast models from which to establish budgets that align with business goals. Once a strategy is in place, cloud cost forecasting accuracy is an important KPI to measure in order to understand cloud efficiency and FinOps success. Measuring forecast accuracy  To measure your forecasting accuracy, you’ll need to calculate the variance between your forecast and actual costs. Once the forecasted spend variance (%) is calculated, it can be compared against the FinOps Community of Practitioners' recommended thresholds: For FinOps practices operating at Crawl maturity, variance from actual spend cannot exceed 20% Variance of 15% for a FinOps practice operating at Walk maturity Variations of 12% for FinOps practices operating at Run maturity [CTA id="6c56537c-2f3f-4ee7-bcc1-1b074802aa4c"][/CTA] In the State of FinOps 2022 report, Run organizations reported 5% variance; Walk organizations reported 10% variance; and Crawl organizations reported 20% variance — a testament to the value of a growing FinOps practice. Accurate cloud spend forecasts require robust FinOps capabilities across the board, including complete multi cloud visibility and the ability to fully categorize and allocate cloud costs. Forecasting cloud costs with Anodot  Anodot’s AI-powered solution analyzes historical data in order to accurately forecast cloud spend and usage by unit of choice, anticipate changing conditions, and get a better read on related costs. This helps organizations to make more informed budgeting decisions and find the right balance between CapEx and OpEx. From a single platform, Anodot provides complete, end-to-end visibility into an organization’s entire cloud infrastructure and related billing costs. By monitoring cloud metrics together with revenue and business metrics, Anodot enables cloud teams to understand the true cost of their cloud resources, with benefits such as: Deep visibility and insights - Report on and allocate 100% of your multicloud costs (with K8 insight down to the pod level) and deliver relevant, customized reporting for each persona in your FinOps organization Easy-to-action savings recommendations - Reduce waste and maximize utilization with 40+ savings recommendations highly personalized to your business and infrastructure Continuous cost monitoring and control - Adaptive, AI-powered forecasting, budgeting and anomaly detection empower you to manage cloud spend with a high degree of accuracy and relevance Immediate value - You'll know how much you can immediately save from day one and rely on pre-configured, customized reports and forecasts to begin eliminating waste