By Eric J. Feldman | @EricJFeldman
When I was in business school, one constant assignment was the analysis of a company or industry business problem. Many of these were based on published case studies by Harvard Business Review, which documented real world challenges. Our job was to present a solution, based on either operations, marketing, finance, or other business disciplines.
In one particular class, the professor had a different type of case study - a real “client.” The assignment was particularly interesting – and difficult. The professor introduced us to a non-profit that needed help, and could not afford professional management or consulting services to help them get out of their jam. The problem? Their technology costs were spiraling out-of-control, and they had no idea where the money was going. They had no resources or tools to analyze their spend, and their increasing monthly technology expenditures were taking money away from their core mission of helping needy families.
Does this sound familiar? There are many areas of IT that individually are inexpensive, but in aggregate can be very expensive. The classic example is storage. Hard drives are cheap, but without the proper tools, you will quickly have volumes of storage that are underutilized, and without knowledge of spending based on usage, you will not have insight into what storage is actually costing you.
Computing power is no different, and a lot of it has been shifting to the cloud, compounding the challenge. The cloud services industry is growing more than five times faster than other IT categories as organizations shift away from internal datacenters to greater use of public cloud infrastructures. Some analysts are predicting that cloud IT spending will match and possibly eclipse traditional IT spending in just a few short years.
And you do not need an MBA to understand why. Cloud infrastructure services provide terrific benefits to an organization. They are easy to purchase. They give you immediate access to computing power, storage, and database services without the need or overhead of setting up or adding to a datacenter. And, they can mean a faster time to value when delivering IT services.
But without the proper tools to provide insight into usage and costs, you can quickly lose control of your total infrastructure spend. The ease of purchase and lower initial cost can easily result in:
- Lack of visibility into total spend on cloud infrastructure services across multiple departments and business units that have multiple cloud accounts
- The growth of “shadow IT” and cloud sprawl which can lead to spiraling and out-of-control costs
- Poor insight into cloud operational data, including utilization of cloud On-D
emand and Reserved Instances
Today, Flexera Software has taken a big step to help organizations overcome these challenges with the release of FlexNet Manager® for Cloud Infrastructure. The first solution from a Software Asset Management (SAM) vendor addressing the management of cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), FlexNet Manager for Cloud Infrastructure gives organizations centralized visibility into their cloud services use and allows them to optimize utilization and control costs.
With FlexNet Manager for Cloud Infrastructure, you can see a 360 degree view of cloud usage and spend, perform detailed analysis of cloud infrastructure usage and costs, share data with key stakeholders, and automatically collect and aggregate usage and cost data from multiple Amazon Web Services accounts.
Learn how FlexNet Manager for Cloud Infrastructure, provides comprehensive, accurate and actionable insight into cloud infrastructure usage by reading our press release, visiting our web site, or downloading the product datasheet.
And for cloud contract negotiation tips and “secrets” be sure to view our on-demand webinar Getting Your Arms around the Cloud, with guest speaker R “Ray” Wang of Constellation Research.