Managing cloud finances can be tricky, considering different hurdles that impact its effectiveness, like lack of cost visibility, unused resources, and more.

Due to this, FinOps teams need help tracking and understanding where the expenses are incurred, making it challenging to control cloud costs. 

In such situations, implementing FinOps solutions can be of help. It can assist organizations to be in better control of cloud finances and optimize resource usage.

FinOps solutions can make the entire process more manageable by helping better understand and control cloud costs.

In this article, we'll discuss some prominent FinOps solutions and how they can help your FinOps team reduce waste and optimize cloud spending with precision and efficiency.

FinOps teams actively manage, monitor, and control cloud spending to optimize costs and resource usage. As a bridge between finance and technology, teams ensure that cloud resources are utilized effectively, budgets are adhered to, and the organization gets the most value.

Before we talk about the benefits of optimizing cloud resource usage and cost, it is important that we understand the FinOps Domain Model, which organizations include in their cloud usage and cost optimization process to gain insight into cost and usage. 

According to FinOps Foundations, there are six FinOps domains, each consisting of capabilities that an organization should have to ensure cloud resource usage and cost optimization. 

Wondering What Makes Storage Optimization Important?

Let’s begin with the Virtana report which states that 94% of respondents acknowledged an increase in their cloud costs, out of which 54% reported that their storage expenditures are outpacing the overall increase in their cloud spending.

If the data is not sufficient for you to make you keep a close eye on your cloud storage resources and optimize them, then it’s time we highlight the benefits you are missing out by overlooking storage optimization.

Businesses that use cloud computing can benefit from storage optimization in several ways:

• Cost reduction: The cost of cloud storage can contribute significantly to overall cloud computing expenses. Businesses can reduce cloud storage costs by optimizing storage, resulting in direct cost savings.
  It is especially important since cloud storage costs can accumulate over time, negatively impacting a company's profitability.
• Scalability and elasticity: By optimizing cloud storage, businesses can scale up or down their storage as necessary, reducing storage costs during low-demand periods and accommodating increased storage requirements during high-demand periods.
• Budgeting and forecasting: Businesses using optimized storage can better predict their cloud storage costs, reducing the likelihood of unexpected overages and budgetary shortfalls.
• Reduced Downtime: Business continuity and data availability are ensured when organizations optimize storage, minimizing data outages and reducing downtime.
• Capacity Planning: Optimising cloud storage offers valuable insights for capacity planning, allowing organizations to make informed decisions about future storage requirements.

Storage plays a crucial role in financial health, and the cost associated with storage contributes to around 30% of the total cloud spend.

Despite this, many businesses tend to overprovision their storage, attempting to maximize their storage capacity for the following reasons.

• Organizations' tendency to overprovision resources is largely due to the lack of advanced storage optimization features offered by current cloud service providers (CSPs). DevOps teams face a substantial workload increase and a longer implementation timeline by developing custom tools.
• Alternatively, CSPs' tools may lead to inefficient, labor-intensive processes impractical for day-to-day operations. As a result, businesses may overprovision resources to ensure continuous operation.

When looked at from a vantage point, overprovisioning results in the following cost-related issues:

• The overprovisioning of cloud storage resources results in unnecessary spending on data storage and data transfer costs. Businesses end up paying for storage they are not actively using.
• Having unused storage means paying for resources that are not being used, resulting in an inefficient allocation of resources.
• Cloud infrastructure has a higher ownership cost when overprovisioned, making it harder to justify its value.

Hence, aside from investing in tools offering insight, budget management, cost allocation, optimization recommendations, and automation, you need to implement additional FinOps solutions focusing on storage optimization.

Combining these features will allow your organization to efficiently manage its cloud resources, reduce unnecessary costs, and align its cloud spending with its financial goals.

But before we explore different FinOps solutions, let's first understand what FinOps is, what FinOps solutions are used for, its benefits, and how to choose a suitable FinOps tool for your organization.  

How FinOps Solutions can help businesses improve financial operations and decision-making?

FinOps solutions can help businesses enhance their financial operations and decision-making through several key factors:

• Providing visibility: FinOps promotes transparency by offering insights into cloud expenditure. It enables businesses to see where their money is being spent, which departments or projects are consuming resources, and whether these expenses align with their strategic goals.
  This visibility allows you to make informed decisions, identify areas that need adjustment, and allocate resources more effectively.
• Cost optimization: One of the primary objectives of FinOps is to optimize costs. By closely monitoring cloud expenses and understanding usage patterns, your FinOps team can identify opportunities to reduce unnecessary spending, eliminate waste, and make cost-effective choices.
• Reducing FinOps effort around management: By implementing FinOps best practices and cloud cost management tools, FinOps can systematically automate financial operation-related tasks and efficiently manage and allocate resources with the help of expert recommendations.
  This way, they can save time and be more efficient with their work.
• Recommendations: Based on data usage and access patterns, FinOps solutions can provide optimization recommendations, such as moving infrequently accessed data to more cost-effective storage classes.
• Capacity planning: Using FinOps solutions, organizations can make informed decisions about when and how much storage is needed by analyzing historical data usage patterns.
• Resource rightsizing: Using these tools, businesses can determine the right size of storage resources for each app or project, avoiding overprovisioning and overspending.

Now that you are familiar with the FinOps tool and its role let's move ahead and find out how to choose the most appropriate FinOps platform for your business needs. 

Top 10 FinOps Solutions 

We've compiled a list of 10 well-known FinOps solutions based on the aforementioned domains You can deploy these solutions to help your FinOps team optimize your cloud cost:

Tool That Will Help With Cloud Usage Optimization

Organizations looking to balance the advantages of cloud with cost-efficiency and performance can utilize the following tool.

1. Lucidity

Lucidity is a NoOps solution provider that integrates seamlessly with your cloud infrastructure. It helps your team optimize storage costs through automation and preventing any possibility of disruption or downtime.

Lucidity addresses the most prevalent challenges encountered by organizations that are adopting cloud storage, such as: 

• Hyperbolized storage: Rather than adjusting their resources as per the changing requirements, organizations tend to overestimate disk growth, leading to unnecessary expenses for unused or underused resources.
• Downtime: Managing and optimizing storage requires manual intervention. This step demands navigating through 3 extra tools and more time and effort from your DevOps team, leading to downtime.
  Also, organizations frequently forget to monitor agents or set alert triggers actively, resulting in delays and further downtime.
• Manual storage management: Managing storage can be quite challenging, and attempting it manually opens the door to potential errors. Reducing storage size manually involves performing 7 distinct manual tasks, including data backup, creating a smaller volume, detaching the original volume, and other tasks.  

Upon investigating the reasons for these challenges, we found out that: 

• Buffer: Managing storage manually necessitates a waiting period to ensure precise data migration and the proper functioning of applications with resized volumes. This implies that a specific timeframe is required between scaling operations, typically around 6 hours.
• Over-estimating the growth: Organizations usually plan for the future by provisioning excess disk space, particularly during peak loads. However, this excess provisioning results in paying for unused resources.
  Furthermore, overprovisioning constraints your flexibility to scale when adding more instances or boosting resource allocation per instance.

• One of the major reasons why organizations prefer overprovisioning the resources is because existing cloud service providers (CSPs) lack the advanced features required to optimize storage; a bespoke tool must be developed.
  The result is a significant increase in workload and a lengthy implementation timeframe for DevOps teams.
• CSPs' tools can, on the other hand, result in inefficient, manual, and resource-intensive processes that are not feasible daily.
  This is why to ensure the uptime of the applications, businesses tend to overprovision the resources.

What does Lucidity do to mitigate these challenges? 

At Lucidity, we understand the importance of efficient FinOps solutions that are dynamic and responsive and offer storage scalability without any downtime or performance lags.

We also understand that the traditional approaches to scaling storage resources lead to overprovisioning, wasting precious resources, or underprovisioning. This causes performance degradation.

We have designed a multi-cloud block storage layer to automate capacity planning. This makes multi-cloud storage management easier for your DevOps team.

It works as an intelligence layer on top of your cloud storage vendor and block storage, eliminating the need for manual capacity management. 

Our Block Storage Auto-Scaler intelligently adjusts the storage capacity, ensuring optimal performance and cost efficiency.

Whether there is a sudden spike in traffic or you are looking for a way to optimize cost in periods of low requirement, our Block Storage Auto-Scaler will optimize storage.

With just 3 clicks, you can reduce your storage cost by up to 70% without any performance issues or downtime. 

With our managed disk auto-scaler installed in your system, your team can ensure the provisioning will be automated. Thus, you no longer will run out of space.

Furthermore, with Lucidity's Managed Disk Auto-Scaler and Storage Audit, your team can effectively manage multi-cloud costs, which will further help streamline the workflow. 

But how does it work? 

Firstly, we conduct a storage audit to perform a detailed storage evaluation to determine the reason for the inefficiency.

After completing the auditing process, it automatically generates reports and highlights the areas for resource optimization and cost savings, which you will receive within a week.

Wondering how do we perform an audit and generate a report so quickly?

Unlike taking the route of manual discovery or utilizing monitoring tools, both of which can be tedious tasks and demand extensive time and resource investment from the DevOps team, we at Lucidity automate the auditing process. 

Lucidity Storage Audit automates the entire process through a user-friendly, easily deployable, executable tool that comprehensively addresses this challenge. Users can easily optimize costs and prevent downtime with this tool since it provides insights into disk health and usage.

To provide you with a clearer understanding, here's how it works in real-time:

• Lucidity's agent captures various storage metrics, such as IOPS, Latency, and Queue, and sends those storage metrics to auto-scaler. 
• After that, auto-scaler algorithms send the command either for expansion or shrinkage to the agent.

Once your team is aware of the areas of improvement, Lucidity deploys its managed disk auto-scaler, which hardly takes 15 minutes to implement. It helps your team take preventative or required action without making any changes within the cloud infrastructure.

How does the Managed Disk Auto-Scaler help?

Our Managed Disk Auto-Scaler can be deployed in 3 clicks. The moment it is onboarded, it will start scaling the storage to achieve a healthy utilization of up to 70-80%, thus bringing down the overall storage cost. 

By expanding within 1 minute of the requirement being raised and shrinking seamlessly, we ensure you always have the storage you need to handle any spike in workload or traffic efficiently.

Lucidity’s Managed-Disk Auto-Scaler ensures seamless expansion and shrinkage of storage resources without any buffer, downtime, or performance degradation.

Here are a few other capabilities that Lucidity offers for effective FinOps management:

• Provides your team with an intuitive dashboard: your team can view cost-saving aspects such as disk coverage, average disk utilization (pre and post-Lucidity), ROI post-Lucidity, how much you have saved with Lucidity, and more.
  With the help of these insights, your team can gain complete visibility into your disk space and cloud cost. Accordingly, they can effectively manage the cost.

• Your team can view the VMs: With the help of the scaler, your team can view Ludicity-managed and unmanaged VMs. For each instance, your team can view the disk utilization, savings, and volumes onboarded and managed by Lucidity.
  How to view VMs? Upon clicking on any managed VM instances, your team will get a More Details window, displaying detailed data about the instance, like Mount Point (the name given to the disk) and Operational Timeline.
  Under the operational timeline, your team can further keep track of the progress of the instances that have been optimized.
  

For example, above, you can see the 5th instance has two volumes, out of which one has been onboarded and hence 1/2.

• It allows your team to create policies: Your team can set parameters like disk utilization, maximum disk, and buffer size so that the cost and storage optimization align with your business requirements. 
  All your team needs to do is go to Manage Policy. Add the details, click Create Policy, and you are ready. All your instances will be optimized as per the Policy from one place.
  You must note that you can create multiple policies for different instances with the desired utilization and buffer, and Lucidity will manage them according to what you want.

• Onboarding a Disk: Onboarding the disk will begin with downloading the Lucidity agent and installing a Virtual Machine, which you can do by copy-pasting the codes for Linux/Windows. Copy the code and run it on your console.

Now that you know what Lucidity offers, why not book a demo? And see for yourself how this NoOps platform can be a game-changing solution for your organization.

Tools That Will Help Understand Cloud Usage And Cost

With these solutions, businesses can gain better control over their cloud-related expenses, optimize cloud resources, and make informed decisions.

2. Apptio

Apptio offers your FinOps team a cloud cost management and optimization solution. It helps your team manage and optimize the cloud costs by letting them transform the way they allocate expenses, visualize data, and optimize resources.

The tool ensures that 100% of costs are allocated (which means every bit of money is being used efficiently) with the help of its advanced business mapping engine, which is part of an automatic showback or chargeback (money-tracking) system. 

Furthermore, Apptio provides curated organization-wide dashboards, vital key performance indicators (KPIs), and trend insights tailored to each user's unique needs, which helps your team make data-driven decisions based on these data. 

Additionally, Apptio's policy-driven rightsizing features provide your FinOps team with specific recommendations to use resources better, reduce waste, and attain the most out of what they have. This way, they can create strategic plans to optimize the cloud costs.  

It also offers cloud total cost of ownership solutions, which assist your financial operations (FinOps) team calculate the complete cost of owning and operating cloud services.

3. AWS Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Explorer is a FinOps tool that offers an easy-to-use interface to visualize, understand, and manage your AWS usage and cost over time.

Furthermore, your FinOps team can generate custom reports that analyze your cost and usage data.

Whether you want a high-level overview, such as total costs and usage across all your accounts, or need details to identify trends, pinpoint cost drivers, and detect anomalies, Cost Explorer has you covered.

But how does it work? You can enable AWS Cost Explorer for your account via the billing and cost management console.

It's important to note that AWS Cost Explorer cannot be enabled using the API. Once enabled, AWS starts preparing your cost data for the current month and the past 12 months, including forecasting for the next 12 months.

‍Your team can access the current month's data in about 24 hours, while the remaining data may take a few days longer. Also, Cost Explorer ensures that your cost data is updated at least once every 24 hours.

Furthermore, your FinOps team can also use granular filtering enabling them to visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage with daily or monthly granularity. For even more detailed insights, hourly and resource-level granularity can be enabled.

Additionally, AWS Cost Explorer allows you to forecast your costs by selecting a future time range for your report.

This forecast can be a valuable tool for estimating your AWS bill and setting alarms and budgets based on these predictions, enhancing your cost management and financial planning.

Tools That Enable Performance Tracking & Benchmarking

With these innovative solutions, organizations gain the ability to not only keep their cloud finances in check but also to measure performance and set benchmarks for continuous improvement.

4. CloudZero

CloudZero offers a cloud FinOps tool that enables your FinOps team to streamline cloud cost management. It allows your team to effectively allocate your spending, decentralize cloud costs, and establish a shared language that bridges the gap between finance, engineering, and all stakeholders involved. 

Furthermore, CloudZero recognizes that FinOps goes beyond mere cost savings; it's about growth and profitability by making strategic investments in the right areas.

This involves presenting meaningful metrics to your stakeholders and holding them accountable for costs while empowering them to make informed decisions that benefit the business.

Also, it equips everyone, including engineering, finance, and executives, with the intelligence needed to optimize cloud expenses. 

The platform ensures that 100% of your spending is allocated efficiently, even in complex and unorganized infrastructure.

‍It transforms your cost data into relevant business dimensions, such as products, features, customers, and unit costs, enabling you to make well-informed decisions about cost management and resource allocation.

Additionally, CloudZero offers the unique benefit of working with a FinOps coach, providing expert guidance to help you set goals, organize untagged infrastructure, and identify optimization opportunities within your cloud cost management strategy.

Also, it tracks costs associated with teams, features, projects, and more, providing stakeholders with real-time visibility into their financial standing and issuing alerts when costs are approaching budget limits.

5. Cycloid

Cycloid simplifies the management and monitoring of your cloud expenses. With its integrated cloud cost management module, your FinOps team can gain access to a graphical representation of costs, presented in a single-panel view that is both user-friendly and highly informative.

This view can be customized to your specific needs, allowing your team to filter expenses by project, cloud provider (such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform), tags, regions, dates, and more.

Furthermore, Cycloid offers a dedicated cloud carbon footprint feature, enabling your team to dive deeper into your cloud's environmental impact. This FinOps tool helps your team make more informed and eco-conscious decisions when it comes to your cloud consumption.

With its asset inventory module, your team can effortlessly oversee all public and private cloud resources through a single panel, offering precise insights into resource usage based on projects, teams, cloud providers, and more.

Also, Cycloid's quota management feature enables your team to establish resource quotas and allocate private cloud assets, including Nutanix and VMware, per team. This optimizes your resource management and enhances your overall operational efficiency.

6. Densify

Densify is a FinOps platform that supports various cloud environments, such as Google Cloud and IBM Cloud. Also, this platform is compatible with container services like RedHat and Kubernetes and hybrid setups on VMware. 

Furthermore, using machine learning, Densify identifies opportunities for optimization and provides precise resource forecasting, which further helps your FinOps team to effectively allocate resources and proactively prevent overprovisioning, resulting in substantial cost reductions.

Additionally, Densify allows your finance and operational teams to strategically create scaling groups and seamlessly integrate FinOps workflows with their DevOps pipelines, which helps enhance their overall operational efficiency.

7. CloudCheckr

CloudCheckr provides your FinOps team with enhanced visibility and intelligent insights, which helps reduce cloud costs, uphold security and compliance, and optimize your cloud resources efficiently. 

Furthermore, with this tool, your FinOps team can drive substantial savings by optimizing your cloud spending by over 30% and uncovering spending trends.

With CloudCheckr, your team can track the factors or reasons behind the expenses incurred using Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud costs, enabling your team to make better, volume-based purchasing decisions and eliminate any wasteful expenditure. 

Also, this platform assists in mitigating both business and regulatory risks by enabling easy monitoring of your cloud infrastructure for secure configurations. It streamlines the management of security, costs, and resources all within a unified platform. 

For those focused on governing the performance of cloud assets in active use, CloudCheckr delivers resource visibility and continuous optimization intelligence.

It minimizes waste through rightsizing and rebalancing while allowing your FinOps team to configure and track utilization metrics in alignment with your IT strategy.

Tool That Enables Real-Time Decision-Making

The cutting-edge solution enables organizations to monitor, analyze, and act on cloud cost data in real-time, enabling them to make better-informed decisions.

8. Harness

Harness offers a cloud cost management product that enables your FinOps team to effectively monitor cloud expenditures. It consistently evaluates cloud resource utilization, providing real-time reports highlighting opportunities to terminate unused instances. 

Furthermore, Harness offers the flexibility to establish and enforce cost policies, enabling your FinOps team to optimize cloud expenses across major cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

Additionally, the solution places a strong emphasis on cost governance. That's why it empowers the FinOps team to implement an automated governance-as-code approach encompassing cost, security, and compliance policies.

It includes rightsizing under-utilized resources and removing unused assets across any cloud environment, resource type, and action. Also, by using Harness AIDA (AI Development Assistant), an AI-powered policy generation, your team can enhance the precision and effectiveness of cost governance practices.

Tool That Empowers Organizational Alignment

This tool provides the insights and controls needed to ensure cloud spending aligns with organizational goals and drives efficiency and profitability.

9. Flexera One

Flexera One offers a comprehensive approach to guide your organization on its FinOps journey.

Collaborative approach offered by platform revolves around a three-step process: "Inform," where visibility is gained to pinpoint areas for potential savings; "Optimize," where actions are taken to maximize those savings; and "Operate," where automated processes are implemented to govern and sustain these optimizations.

Furthermore, with Flexera One, your FinOps team can efficiently monitor cloud usage allocation, costs, and discounting cloud services from both public and private cloud accounts, allowing for the identification of cloud cost optimization and savings opportunities. 

Also, this platform provides intelligent recommendations for taking action on non-optimized resources on an ongoing basis, significantly improving the efficiency of your cloud spending.

By offering spend anomalies reporting and implementing budget controls and cost policies, Flexera helps your FinOps team eliminate wasteful expenditures. 

Additionally, its robust functionality encourages cloud governance teams to collaborate effectively with business units and cloud resource owners to report, manage, and optimize cloud spending.

Tool That Offers Cloud Rate Optimization

In order to efficiently manage the various pricing components of cloud services, this tool helps organizations define their pricing goals, fine-tune their pricing models based on historical data, and acquire commitment-based discounts.

10. ProsperOps

ProsperOps offers an innovative solution that efficiently optimizes your AWS cloud expenses, all while minimizing long-term commitment risks, and it operates 24/7 without the requirement of manual intervention.

The algorithms automatically maximize your AWS discounts, securing substantial savings for your organization. 

Furthermore, you only need to pay for ProsperOps' services when it successfully saves you money, eliminating any upfront cost or risk.

Additionally, implementing ProsperOps is very simple; it takes only a few hours and requires no changes to your infrastructure or access to your data.

Also, there's no ongoing operational coordination or management burden, as it continuously operates silently, maximizing your savings around the clock.

Apart from that, ProsperOps's intuitive dashboard provides essential FinOps insights while it offers dynamic showback by business unit, region, and more, along with dynamic prepay amortization tracking and multi-organization reporting.

ProsperOps' capabilities extend beyond cost savings; it automates cloud optimization tasks that were traditionally handled manually, freeing up your FinOps teams to focus on higher-value tasks.

Take Charge Of Your Cloud Cost Management Today!

FinOps solutions can effectively manage and optimize your cloud finances, ensuring maximum value from your cloud environment.

This blog showcases the top 10 FinOps solutions that provide a wide range of capabilities to assist businesses in controlling cloud expenses, gaining valuable insights, and improving financial visibility. 

These tools enable organizations to make informed decisions regarding cost analysis, monitoring, resource optimization, and budget management. By utilizing these FinOps solutions, your business can reduce waste, enhance efficiency, and ultimately achieve greater success in their cloud operations.