Cloud Economics Services

Getting the most out of your investment.

Enterprise companies are fast-tracking to the cloud, mainly for the purported cost savings. But after lifting and shifting their workloads, they are surprised to find their actual cloud spend consistently exceeds expectations.

This overage is likely due to the sprawl of unmanaged resources and improper architectures – not much different from their on-prem environment.

An often underplayed fact is that cloud costs can be complex and time-consuming to manage across an organization.

“80% of organizations will overshoot their IaaS budget due to lack of cloud cost optimization governance, and misguided upfront cloud spend commitments.” – Gartner

Adding to the complexity, Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) have over 500,000 distinct prices and technical combinations that can overwhelm the most experienced IT organizations and business units. And staying on top of new product offerings and architecture best practices takes significant resources, tools, and expertise, which all may be hard to come by.

To ensure your company takes full advantage of the cloud, you must factor cloud economics into your transformation journey.

 

What is Cloud Economics?

Cloud economics studies the costs and benefits of cloud computing and the economic values that strengthen them. It compels you to deeply explore a cloud migration’s return on investment (ROI) and the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a cloud solution instead of an on-prem one.

Cloud economics provides the foundation for consistent infrastructure and operations across IT environments, enabling organizations to unlock additional operational savings and reduce complexity. An additional economic benefit is business agility. By using computing resources, companies can quickly deploy applications to meet customer demands better and remain competitive.

What is FinOps?

FinOps is an evolving cloud financial management discipline and cultural practice that enables organizations to get maximum business value by helping engineering, finance, technology and business teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions.
– FinOps Foundation Technical Advisory Council

The FinOps philosophy and approach is how you gain cost control in your cloud environment. It is a prescriptive model of actions, best practices, and culture to bring financial accountability to an ever-fluctuating cloud cost model. FinOps practices are iterative by nature and, if done continuously, will improve and mature over time.

By combining systems, best practices, and culture, FinOps increases your ability to understand cloud costs and make appropriate tradeoffs. “

How We Help

 

2nd Watch takes a holistic approach to cloud economics and follows the FinOps Foundation’s Principles to ensure your cloud environments run as efficiently as possible. Our experienced data scientists and architects use our proprietary Innovation Scoring system to help you identify opportunities for optimization and modernization in a data-driven way. As an AWS Premier Partner, Google Cloud Partner, and Microsoft Gold Partner, we have deep knowledge and understanding of their products from both a licensing and technical perspective. We tailor our recommendations and optimization engine for you to take control of your cloud spend using the following optimization process:

Data Collection

The following data is collected from the environment:

 CSP Invoices

 Cost & Usage Report

 CSP Advisor Data

 Client Metadata

Data Analysis & Review

The following activities are performed:

 Savings Plan & Reserved Instance Analysis

 Instance Rightsizing

 Instance Family Refresh

 Examine Use of Multi-AZ Database Usage

 Storage Lifecycle Analysis

 Look for Auto Park Candidates

 Look for waste

 Negotiate CUD/EDP/PPAs

 Meet with client to review findings

Data-Driven Outcomes

We deliver the following information to the client:

 Monthly Dashboard

 Savings Recommendations

 Consolidated Invoice

 Tagging/Label Scorecard

2nd Watch Cloud Economics Services:

Cloud Cost Optimization & Analytics

  • Strategy & Planning
  • Cost Optimization Assessment
  • Spot Instance and Container Optimization
  • Multi-Cloud Optimization
  • Forecasting, Modeling, and Analytics

FinOps Driven Modernization

  • Identify business needs & priorities
  • Ingest cloud cost and application data
  • Score each business unit and its applications
  • Determine best course of action

Featured Partners

2nd Watch partners with the top data technologies to build the right solution for your organization’s goals, including Cloud Optimization consulting.