The FinOps tooling landscape is dynamic and constantly evolving, with new specialized solutions flooding the market. While others offer niche products, solving for one cloud provider or one capability, IBM offers a FinOps solution for all – all cloud providers, all cloud costs, all maturity levels, and all FinOps stakeholders.

Backed by market-leading tools like Cloudability and Turbonomic, the IBM FinOps suite provides FinOps professionals with the tools they need to establish the fundamentals of cloud cost management and push beyond as they mature their practices – enabling deeper insights, greater efficiency, and enhanced value from every dollar spent in the cloud.

Challenges Met Head-On

Combined under the IBM FinOps suite, IBM Cloudability and Turbonomic address the most pressing challenges in cloud financial management:

• Cost Transparency and Control: Effectively manage all cloud program costs, visualizing and normalizing costs across cloud providers, cloud services, containerized infrastructure, commitment programs, and shared costs. Detailed insights, comprehensive analytics and flexible reporting capabilities helps organizations understand, manage and forecast cloud costs with greater accuracy, ensuring that teams are accountable for their cloud consumption and cloud budgets are more precise and defensible.
• Operational Efficiency: Complementing these financial capabilities is the ability to easily surface cloud waste to spur optimization – helping practitioners apply FinOps practices across their full stack. Automate optimization actions based on real-time demands to ensure that resources are efficiently utilized while assuring performance without the risk of over-provisioning. Achieve further efficiency by defining goals that correlate to business impact and leverage automated optimization to ensure apps continuously meet service level objectives (SLOs).
• Collaborative FinOps: FinOps practitioners need products that are designed with all FinOps personas in mind, bringing together IT, finance, and DevOps teams to optimize cloud resources for speed, cost, and quality. This synergy helps in aligning business and financial strategies with technical execution, fostering a unified approach to cloud financial management.

Hyland’s Transformational Journey with Cloudability and Turbonomic

A prime example of the benefits derived from this integration is the success story of Hyland, a global leader in content services. Faced with escalating cloud costs and complex resource management challenges, Hyland turned to the combined capabilities of Cloudability and Turbonomic to streamline its cloud operations.

Joseph Quinto, Cloud Business Operations Manager at Hyland, shares his experience: “We reduce costs by taking action based on what appears in Cloudability. For example, we recently started using a new version of Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). Cloudability showed a significant cost increase related to Amazon RDS. We were able to update a setting that reduced our Amazon RDS cost by more than 50%.”

As shared at AWS re:Invent 2023, Hyland’s use of IBM Turbonomic to automate workload placement and resource optimization, recovered over 13 TB of memory and 7,000 vCPUs—the subsequent rightsizing that ultimately deferred the need to purchase 60 additional servers, ultimately saving the company $3.6 million.

A Unified Approach to FinOps

As FinOps teams become increasingly cross-functional and work together to address evolving challenges, the need for tooling designed to help practitioners navigate their FinOps journey and grow in line with their team, scope, and goals is critical.

IBM Cloudability provides a granular view into cloud expenses, offering tools that help organizations track, analyze, and optimize their cloud spend. Its robust financial management framework helps businesses implement effective governance and cost control measures. IBM Turbonomic extends these capabilities into the operational domain, using AI-driven analytics to make real-time adjustments that balance performance needs with cost-efficiency. This ensures that organizations can achieve optimal cloud performance without unnecessary expenditure. Layering in cloud unit economics completes the picture by connecting these optimizations to measurable business outcomes.

By building these essential elements into one unified experience, IBM is revolutionizing the way FinOps team manage their cloud resources. By combining detailed financial management with proactive operational optimization, IBM Cloudability is setting new standards in the industry, enabling businesses to not only keep pace with the evolving cloud landscape but to lead it.

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Hyland transformed multiple business challenges into streamlined success with the combined capabilities of Cloudability and Turbonomic. Read their story.