CloudVerse targets interoperability to manage multicloud spending

Cost management and fragmented data

There’s no standardization on billing, API, CLI, and console operations among cloud services.

This lack of interoperability not only makes it hard to transfer workloads, but also to ingest cost data into a unified report or dashboard. 

Organizations, product teams and engineers are pacing Agile software delivery with multicloud. In the context of finance, finding savings by using specific services here and there is evident. The overhead of managing resources and budget allocations is paramount. 

Cloud cost management tools, whether self-built or a vendor solution, all key into the single purpose of simplifying usage reporting and analysis. Without the assistant, understanding what the numbers are saying would be:

• IT-and-engineer dependent: ad-hoc efforts to custom scripts for data exports for each provider
• Fragmented in data mapping and resource allocation: different perspectives or granularity on costs encompass time to build dashboards (e.g., filters by project, department or resource)
• Difficult to onboard and train business members: with so many technical terminologies and billing structures, a personnel without prior extensive hand-ons cloud usage faces a steep learning curve, which forces an IT or engineer to involve
• Unreliable to govern team accountability: inconsistent insights and recommendations to translate into practical cost policies that to forecast over or under provisioning. 

What multicloud cost management need to impact

Engineer productivity for cost accountability

Resource availability is pivotal to keeping engineers equipped for agile software development. At the same time, understanding how usage correlate to costs is also a shared responsibility. Becoming adept at building with cloud resources, testing and deploying code already takes the majority of their brain matter, so understanding their cost shouldn’t be a restriction that keeps them on their toes every second. For this to happen, platform engineering for finance solutions should be able to enable key stakeholders to self-serve via alerts and budget thresholds to take action on anomalies on-time. Likewise, actionable recommendations to oversee cost variances would naturally create mindfulness.

Control and Data plane security compliance

A cloud strategy for cost management always needs to factor in security. Some practices include:

• Identity and Access Management (IAM): configure just the level of access that a specific account needs to control authentication and authorization 
• Cloud credentials and third-party services: be sure to have done research on the services you’re using on how they store and connect to your cloud architecture
• Network connectivity: VPN or dedicated connections are commonly used as a way to encrypt and restrict unwanted traffic

Cost and saving accountability : Finance, IT and Product/Engineering

Governance, architecture, operations, product management, finance and application development need to be a single force to control costs. Any cost-related strategies like financial targets, cost allocation methodologies and budgeting constraints need to be well understood by all sides. Though Finance or the person in charge of cloud finance has oversight over all spending, there needs to be accountability and involvement from product owners, engineers and respective leads. 

In order to assist organizations in adopting multicloud swiftly and effectively, the CloudVerse Multicloud Management Platform focuses on these core tenets:

• Simplicity - while multicloud is complex, defining the right processes with tools would help reduce time to market. The goal is to make cloud infrastructure invisible and improve collaboration among multiple groups and bring in simplicity and self-service in all actions
• Security - discover and address the cloud misconfigurations; the goal is to help increase the confidence levels and help organizations be compliant at all times
• Cost-Efficiency - with growing cloud footprint, it is very important to be cost-efficient at all times; cost spend analysis, cost optimisation recommendations and budgeting across IaaS and PaaS cloud services ensure better cost visibility, optimisation and cost governance controls enabling collaborative approach

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