Cloud Cost Management as a Service
Create business value through FinOps and Cloud Cost Management
Cloud services are easy to use, very flexible and extremely scalable. Which means the cloud is easy to overuse, difficult to track, and challenging to control. That’s where Cloud Cost Management comes in, showing what cloud services you use, where and how they’re running. Specifically designed to support your FinOps teams and Cloud Centers of Excellence (CCoE). Optimize your SaaS, PaaS, CaaS, and IaaS costs by getting a solid overview, keeping tabs on what’s consumed, and analyzing your cloud licenses and migration in nearly real-time. Get USU Cloud Cost Management as a Service to build an effective cloud management process and to elevate your cloud ROI.
Top 3 benefits of Cloud Cost Optimization
Gather all cloud vendors in a central view
Our solution pulls your cloud data from all the hyperscaler portals and organizes them into a centralized multi-cloud overview.
Avoid fines and fees for using too much
It’s easy to accidentally over-consume in the cloud, which is why our cloud cost management solution helps you avoid using more than you budgeted for.
Balance costs and options in subscriptions
We make sure you’re using the cloud services in your license agreements and save money.
The Solution: Cloud Cost Management and Optimization
USU Cloud Cost Management as a Service offers easy to use cost reporting for complex multi-cloud environments of Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. USU helps enterprises to gain transparency and minimize financial risks by reporting the use and utilization of compute and SQL instances and its associated costs across multiple cloud providers. Enterprises need these insights to better manage their cloud environment, to monitor costs, and plan their investments. By combining enterprise-ready SaaS technology and Managed Services to powerful forces USU automates data collection, connector monitoring, and the ongoing reporting. While USU takes care of all the technical details and its ongoing management the Customer can focus on the results to derive strategic actions and create added value for their enterprises.
Basic offering:
Budget planning
- Adoption of cloud budgets based on customer plan data
- Budget data per provider, resource type and business service
Visibility & Controlling
- Display of current cloud costs per provider, resource type and business service over time
- Comparison of ACTUAL/PLANNED costs
- Forecast of costs for the fiscal year
- Data delivery for invoicing in the ERP system
Extended offering:
Optimization
- Identification of unused and optimizable cloud resources
- Optimization recommendations based on available data, e.g.,
- Right-sizing
- Additional discounts
- BYOL rights
Cover all essential cloud services
Cloud hyperscalers like AWS or Azure are more than happy to point that you can cut cloud costs. However, until you fully understand the variable spend model of public clouds and implement appropriate cloud management solutions, savings will remain a hope and be slow to materialize.
SaaS (Software as a Service)
Our solution calculates the licenses you need from SaaS tools such as Office 365, WebEx, Salesforce, and Creative Cloud.
Current situation
- Many vendors
- Many contracts
- Different metrics
- Lack of visibility
- Inactivity and overlicensing lead to waste of money
PaaS (Platform as a Service), CaaS (Container as a Service), IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)
Our services ensures you’re paying the right cost model for essential public cloud services, such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
Current situation
- Few vendors
- Choice between BYOL or rent licenses
- Various licensing and compliance rules for using on-prem licenses in the cloud
- Many commercial options: pay as you go, reserved instances, committed spend
Learn more
Manage a multi-cloud view
Your cloud services handle their own back end. But each cloud provider has their own portal for billing and reporting. Wouldn’t it be great to manage those statistics and KPIs in one place? You can - from the solution dashboard.
Cloud APIs
Pull data directly from monitoring tools like Amazon CloudWatch and Google Stackdriver
Server needs
Evaluate servers, instances, and VMs to suggest the configurations and core distribution.
Right size licenses
Decide how many licenses you need based on metrics like servers, instances, processing, and users.
Unleash rich reporting capabilities
Different stakeholders will want different data at different levels of detail. This is why you need to create and distribute your reporting with regular frequency and ensure it’s hitting the mark by checking in frequently with your stakeholders.
From the minute you pull data into the solution, you can report on it – in nearly real-time. See your information in a centralized dashboard and share Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and dashboard data with your coworkers and decision makers. Your reports can ensure that IT, Procurement, and C-Suite know the value of managing multi-cloud environments.
Our comprehensive reporting will allow you to:
- See daily activity and trends in charts and graphs
- View historical data about software trends and usage
- Get notified when your contracts will change
- Share dashboards and critical reporting views
- Answer “over time” questions about software licenses
- Analyze and identify the minimum license needs
Cloud Savings: Sample Calculation
5000 Servers in Azure
- 2500 Windows Servers (BYOL)
- 2500 Linux Servers
1 year committed spend savings program, no reserved instances
$435,000 per month = $5.23M per year
Consumption reduction of 10-30%
Net savings of $500K - $1.5M by identifying:
- Right-sizing
- Additional discounts
- BYOL rights
USU x The ITAM Review Podcast
Rich Gibbons talks cloud cost optimisation with fellow cloud guru Robbie Plourde from USU. They discuss the different ways that ITAM can, and should, be involved in helping manage cloud spend including:
• Aligning with FinOps
• Managing hybrid environments
• Bring Your Own Licensing (BYOL)
• Focusing on spend efficiency
• Engaging with stakeholders
as well as identifying transferable skills between ITAM & cloud management and supporting the culture shift within a business.
Robbie also shares his 5 top tips for making an impact in this area so don't miss out!
