Podcast

Cloud Cost Optimization Podcast

E43: What is the FinOps Framework and How Can it be Applied to My Organization?

FRAME IT, WORK IT Every system, process, or operation is built on a framework, and the same goes for FinOps. Nick and Jason continue with their FinOps series and today, they discuss the FinOps Framework and how it can be applied to your organization. Our duo gets down with the details starting from the core elements of the FinOps Framework, to understanding cloud usage and cost, and many more. Find out more about the FinOps Framework in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: THE CORE ELEMENTS OF THE FINOPS FRAMEWORK “They call them core elements. We've talked about some of them in some of our episodes, but Principles, Personas, Phases, Maturity, Domains, and Capabilities are the core elements of the FinOps framework.” JASON: ADVICE FOR THOSE STILL STARTING WITH THEIR FRAMEWORK “The first phase is to start with Inform. Inform gives you visibility and allows you to allocate your environment properly, budget, and forecast out into the future. So that's where I would start, with the informed phase, set realistic, SMART goals for the organization and what they want to achieve from either allocating, whatever is important, allocation, anomalies, forecasting, whatever is important to the organization, set those and then start to live up.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicklumsden/ Jason Yaeger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonyaeger/ Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

E42: How FinOps Can Improve Your Bottom Line

APPLICATION LEADS TO RESULTS. RESULTS LEAD TO IMPACT. We have talked about the definition of FinOps, its terminologies, benefits, and core principles. In this episode, Nick and Jason will be discussing how FinOps can impact your bottom line towards improvement. Our duo will be touching on lift and shift, allocation, visibility, transparency, predictability, and many more. Stay tuned to learn more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: THE PROBLEM WITH THE LIFT AND SHIFT “If you're only doing the lift and shift portion of whatever you're calling your digital transformation, or your migration to the cloud, in effect you’re not getting the true value from the cloud, because primarily, lift and shift deals with a lot of legacy compute.” NICK: FACTORS THAT IMPACT THE BOTTOMLINE “Direct effect on the bottom line, I'm gonna drop dollars down to my EBITDA, and then there's also rate-based optimization, so I'm going to be able to commit to using certain things, and right down to my bottom line. So those are sorts of two economic drivers for impacting your driving bottom line. But there are all these other sorts of value points, I think you touched on in the beginning of that which was visibility and transparency, this sort of idea of data-driven decisions. So now I can get predictability. So once I have predictability, then I can start to make decisions about things I want to do.” JASON: TRUE BENEFIT OF FINOPS “I think FinOps is designed to help companies increase revenue, lower the cost it takes to support that revenue, and allow companies to truly leverage the benefits of the cloud without the apprehension that comes with it.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicklumsden/ Jason Yaeger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonyaeger/ Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

E41: What are the Core Principles when Incorporating FinOps?

LET’S TAKE IT DOWN TO THE CORE In the past episodes we have been diving into a deeper understanding of FinOps, and today we will be learning more. Nick and Jason will discuss the Core Principles when incorporating FinOps into your organization. The two will talk about the importance of communication, data-driven decisions, taking advantage of the variable cost model, accountability, and many more. So make sure you tune in until the end of this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY NICK: TEAMS SHOULD COLLABORATE EVERY SINGLE DAY “The best teams I've ever seen in the most secure organizations I’ve ever seen is where those two teams find a way to collaborate every single day by getting rid of each other's anxiety.” NICK: IMPORTANCE OF DATA-DRIVEN DECISION MAKING “This might be the most important, it’s data-driven decision-making, making sure that decisions are actually driven by business value in the cloud. And I think this is easy to say, I think every organization says it, but I think nearly every organization I have been involved with, at least early on, has been very immature in actually doing it.” NICK: TAKING ADVANTAGE OF THE VARIABLE COST MODEL OF THE CLOUD “Being able to take advantage of variable cost and the sorts of economics that can happen, once you get out of a legacy mindset around your app and get into the cloud first, or the cloud-native mindset runs your app. This is extremely powerful because I don't want my app consuming resources when the app’s not being consumed, and legacy models are built around persistent workloads that consume the cloud all the time. And you want to get to this world where I can take advantage of those variable costs.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicklumsden/ Jason Yaeger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonyaeger/ Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

E40: How to Sell the Importance of FinOps to Your Organization

IS FINOPS SALEABLE TO YOUR ORGANIZATION? As many organizations normally operate, every course of action that needs to be done or proposed to be taken will undergo a series of approvals and a whole lot of convincing and selling. If the action to take entails some cost, oftentimes it’s a hard sell. In this episode, Nick and Jason will be talking about how you can effectively sell the importance of FinOps in your organization. Stay tuned until the end in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: A SIGNIFICANT PORTION OF THE COST STRUCTURE “Cloud has to be a significant meaningful portion of your overall cost structure for the cost savings or optimization piece to bubble up to that level.” JASON: ALIGNING WITH THE PROBLEM VIA PERSONA “It's about aligning the problems that the organization faces, with how FinOps will solve some of those problems in the language that your persona identifies with. So as we mentioned with CEO, it's going to be about accelerating growth. We talked a little bit about CFOs, it's going to be more about cost visibility and making sure that you're accurately forecasting. But the key is that one, I'm assuming you have a set of problems identified, because you're looking at FinOps, and aligning those problems with how FinOps will help you solve them to the personas that you're talking to.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicklumsden/ Jason Yaeger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonyaeger/ Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

E39: What are the Benefits of Incorporating FinOps in Your Organization?

WHAT’S A COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS FOR WITHOUT TALKING ABOUT BENEFITS? In the past episodes, Nick and Jason have talked about the basics of FinOps, its definition, and the terminologies involved in it. In this installment of their FinOps series, the duo will be talking about the benefits of incorporating FinOps in your organization. The two will talk about the problems experienced pre-FinOps and how they are dealt with, capabilities for transparency and data-driven decision-making, and giving predictability to a project's cost. Learn more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: THE TRUE GOAL OF GOING TO THE CLOUD “Could you potentially save some money? Yes. I mean, that's definitely possible, because I'm going to use what I need to use, but it's not necessarily the goal of using the cloud, the goal of using the cloud is to grow, to become, to generate more revenue to be more innovative and to get things done faster than I ever can before.” JASON: FINOPS ALLOWS YOU TO MAKE DATA-DRIVEN DECISIONS “More than just looking, it allows you to take that data, not only to understand what my costs were, but also what my costs are going to be so that I can make better decisions about how I leverage technology. ” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicklumsden/ Jason Yaeger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonyaeger/ Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

E33: NEWS CLUES: Cloud Cost Insights On Recent Economics News

IS THERE REALLY SOMETHING TO FEAR? The IMF recently reported that the majority of countries are unlikely to enter into a recession. However, industry analysts are still predicting a shallow recession is possible. In line with this recent news, Nick and Jason share their thoughts on what this means for cloud spending and cost, and how this impacts budgeting for the year. The two also discuss how this relates to people’s current sentiments on the economy, labor’s current status, and how tech companies are preparing for the coming shallow recession. Find out more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY NICK: THOUGHTS ON ECONOMIC SENTIMENT “The sentiment is still there. And it takes a while to change. It takes a while to change sentiment around the economy. Everyone's looking for the positive signals and the uptick, but everybody's in conservative mode.” JASON: OVERHIRING IS THE TRUE REASON FOR LAY-OFFS “I think a lot of the tech layoffs were due to the over-hiring during the pandemic, and it just and obviously preparing for what could come in 2023.” NICK: KEEP CONTROL OF YOUR CLOUD SPEND “It's still important to keep control over those cloud spending, I think we got a long road out of the downturn still, in certainly with labor shift, it becomes more important than ever to kind of have your arms around what's going on inside of your organization, whether that's building a fin ops discipline internally, or whether that's, you know, getting help from an external source, or that's having the right tools in place in order to have that visibility.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

E21: FIN-TRINITY: Analyzing The Three Main Components Of Financial Management

HAVE YOU BEEN IMPLEMENTING YOUR FINOPS WELL? Nick and Jason discuss financial management and its three main components - budget, cash flow, and risk. They also talk about how organizations implementing their FinOps practices or their own cloud center of excellence should be thinking about these primary areas, and how the tooling can help them out. Learn more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: WHAT TO DO WHEN LEVERAGING THE CLOUD “If you're going to leverage the cloud, and allow your organization to leverage the benefits of the flexibility, and the elasticity and all of those things, then you just have to, you have to get comfortable with the fact that because these costs can vary greatly, as you mentioned, variable costs, you have to get comfortable with knowing that budget, cash flow, and risk are going to have to be managed differently than they were when you could touch the servers.” JASON: STOP SPENDING ON WHAT YOU DON’T NEED “Stop spending money, cash on things you don't need, right? I mean, cash flow, and I know maybe this isn't the same necessarily the same thing with a capital environment, but if your costs aren't changing, as you add more customers, that means you're overpaying today.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

E16: MYTHBUSTERS: Nick And Jason Debunks That Finops Is Not Just About Saving Money

THIS MYTH IS BUSTED! In today's episode, Nick and Jason dispel the myth that FinOps is only about saving companies money. FinOps is actually about so much more than that, it's about optimizing resources, improving efficiencies, and ensuring that an organization's finances are in good shape. While saving money is certainly a goal of FinOps, it's not the only one, and it's important to understand all of the different facets of FinOps in order to properly implement it within your organization. Find out more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: How FinOps help the finance teams “It was hard for finance teams to keep up with the pace of change that was happening, and then I think FinOps is a way to help those finance teams along the way and give them the tools and the processes necessary to be able to adapt to that change.” JASON: FinOps is not just for “savings” “Only one leg of the FinOps operating model is optimal savings, optimization in the terms of and then even though that savings is typically only even a facet of that, but if you look at the operating model, it's about being able to predict and understand when these things changes before they happen. So that you can react and save that budget before it becomes an issue.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

E15: CONTEXT COMPLEX: Understanding Context As A Method Of Understanding

CONTEXT IS IMPORTANT IN UNDERSTANDING A LOT OF THINGS, BUT HOW DO WE UNDERSTAND CONTEXT ITSELF? Nick and Jason talk about the importance of context in understanding cloud management and consumption. They discuss how context allows you to apply specific business data to your review of cloud spend or utilization. Without context, data can be viewed in a generic way that may not be helpful to your specific business needs. Learn more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: Initial thoughts on what context is “I think, to probably make it as short as possible, it's to apply the things that are specific to my business to the data that I'm reviewing. In the cloud, it's typically spend, utilization, or optimization, based on maybe products or business groups or teams, which could be many different things. So it's viewing that data within the context that matters to me and not some generic way. NICK: Context is very important in trying to solve a problem “I have a bunch of alert noise in my slack channel or in my support system, what do I do with it? And we hear this one all the time, providing context around why the alert was actually generated, and what sorts of issues exist in the environment that could lead to it is really critical for an engineer trying to solve the problem.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

E14: I CAN AZURE YOU: Looking Into The Release Of Azure Savings Plans

AND NOW WE’RE LEVELING THE PLAYING FIELD For years, Microsoft Azure’s only weak point against AWS is the lack of a savings plan that enterprise clients can subscribe to, but in the recent news, they have announced the release of their Azure Savings Plans. Nick and Jason will be diving into this really exciting update for all cloud computing users out there and will be sharing their thoughts, so tune in and find out more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: Azure Savings Plans makes it easier to save money “I think they're making it easier to save money, I think historically, you know, this was a differentiator for AWS. Whereas, you know, Azure would come in and, you know, get you into some sort of Enterprise Agreement, which, you know, the enterprise agreements require a level of commitment that's a little bit different than what you would expect, you know, if you want to just go, I want to go spin some stuff up, right, get stuff working, I'm an organization like that.” NICK: Microsoft’s challenges before the Azure Savings Plans “I think Microsoft's been battling their legacy customer licensing model for quite a while, and AWS didn't have that problem. From the start, they were able to adopt an enterprise discount program that made sense in the context of offering public cloud service rights that were consumption-based.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

E13: MIGRATION FINomenon: Implementing Fin Ops Discipline During Migration

THAT’S HOW IT COSTS? WHAT A SHOCKER Welcome to another episode with Nick and Jason, as they talk about applying a finance discipline when doing a cloud migration. The two discuss the importance of taking time to set up principles and governance for a cloud environment before migrating, as it can save a lot of time and effort in the long run. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: What happens if you layoff half your force “As a technology person. I want to get fin ops discipline in place so that I don't spook my CFO, and as a CFO, I want to get that fin ops methodology in place so I can get reporting right away during the migration, so I can see early problems immediately…” JASON: What happens if you layoff half your force “True cost by resource, or, you know, down to the individual widget perspective, if you're internal, that's always been really difficult. It's not in the cloud, and so sometimes when we're doing a migration, we see the costs of the cloud, and it's either we go ‘ ‘oh, my gosh, that's how much that one resource costs me?’ ’ Well, it's not that that resource is more expensive. It's just now you know, you had no idea what that resource costs you when it was sitting on a server unless it was unless you bought individual servers for everything.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

E12: HARD DECISION TO MAKE: A Talk On The Current Layoff Situation And Its Impact On Cloud Spend

LAYOFFS HERE, LAYOFFS THERE, HAPPENING EVERYWHERE It’s alarming to see that a lot of organizations in the tech space right now are cutting down their people in massive numbers. Our hosts Nick Lumsden and Jason Yaeger will be focusing today on all things layoff, what’s happening now, what are its common causes, and its impact on downsizing organizations. Tune in to get yourself informed in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. HIGHLIGHTS JASON: What happens if you layoff half your force “If you lay off half of your staff, and then ask the other half of your staff to work twice as hard, you're probably going to churn out another, I don't know 15-20%, because there will be people that go ‘ ‘no, I'm not I'm not doing that.” JASON: Keep as many people as you can “I don't know if this would have this works at these really large organizations, but it's always better when you try to preserve as many jobs as you can, realistically, and so asking people to take pay cuts, and minimizing the percentage of staff that you actually have to turn, in my opinion, is probably a better way to handle these situations.” JASON: Impact of layoffs on cloud spend “The less people you have, the less time you have to do all of the things that all of the things outside just keeping the lights on and running, you know, which include making, you know, they include all of your efforts around cloud spend optimization.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

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