Its GreenLake solution is heavily dependent on and already white-labels Morpheus’ product as its own hybrid cloud management offering. Morpheus, a leader in hybrid cloud management, adds massive credibility to HPE’s GreenLake product, which positions itself as a hybrid cloud solution but lacks true native management capabilities.

Cloud Cost Management And Optimization Solutions Deconstructed A graphic that shows the standard capabilities of a CCMO solution.

In the early days of FinOps, managing cloud costs required a DIY approach, using a spreadsheet with manual updates. But over the last decade, a whole market serving cloud cost management and optimization (CCMO) launched into popularity. The days of DIY were seemingly over, reserved for small organizations just getting their FinOps journey off the ground. However, a new era of DIY cloud management has begun — one that is not powered by the spreadsheets of old.

On the other hand, if you already have a hybrid cloud management solution, there’s generally no need to purchase a separate cloud cost management tool. Is hybrid cloud management the same as multicloud management? The marketplace includes two types of solutions: those that primarily focus on public clouds with some on-premises visibility (multicloud management) and those that can build and manage private clouds and manage public clouds (hybrid cloud management).

The capabilities required for public and private cloud management vary greatly, so this distinction drastically affects cost and functionality. In 2022, we evaluated hybrid cloud management platforms, which focus on the management of public and private cloud, not multicloud management tools, which focus primarily on public cloud. In our evaluation, we found that the hybrid cloud management platform market is changing direction.

For an overview of vendors that offer hybrid cloud management tooling, see The Forrester Wave™: Hybrid Cloud Management, Q4 2022 and Now Tech: Hybrid Cloud Management, Q2 2022. The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Cost Management And Optimization, Q3 2022 and Now Tech: Cloud Cost Management And Optimization, Q2 2022 provide detailed evaluations of the top cloud cost management players. Remember that the highest rated vendor may not have the tooling that most closely aligns with your needs.

Protect against overprivileged users with excessive rights to the platform’s encryption key management, such as AWS Key Management Service, Azure Key Vault, and GCP Cloud Key Management. Step Nine: Cover Hypervisor Network Policies Configure CIEM solutions to pay special attention to cloud admin users with access to next-generation firewalls, virtual private clouds (VPCs), VPNs, routing tables, load balancers, and network ACL policies.

Cloud Cost Management And Optimization Solutions: Core Use Cases Figure 4 Cloud Cost Management And Optimization Solutions: Extended Use Cases Figure 5 Functionality By Use Case Functionality priorities will vary by use case. For example, cloud cost allocation is important for cloud cost visibility, budgeting, and forecasting, but it provides little insight for identifying cloud cost waste or optimizing resource sizing and configuration.

At the intermediate maturity stage, organizations should seek to accelerate modernization, standardize tools and practices, implement automation, and refine governance and change/knowledge management (see Figure 3). These factors will transform cloud from a technical initiative into a business accelerator. Take these steps to advance your practice: Establish a cloud-aware IT change management process.

Organizations therefore need to create new roles to focus on cloud efficiency and related sustainability. This may be adjacent to, or include, the FinOps practice focused on cost management. Cloud efficiency is a discipline that can and should create a supporting ecosystem for the CIO to oversee IT and cloud choices that balance latency, performance, and other needs with the company’s cloud efficiency targets.