Helping companies go beyond savings with Spot by NetApp for FinOps

We’re thrilled to be back again at FinOps X in San Diego. The premier FinOps event of the year, it’s a fitting place to proudly announce that the Spot by NetApp product portfolio is now a FinOps Certified Platform. This FinOps Foundation certification reaffirms our commitment to supporting the FinOps framework and best practices. It also reinforces the underlying purpose of the Spot by NetApp FinOps product suite: to solve the root causes, not just the symptoms, of FinOps challenges by delivering the solutions that provide the analysis, insights and technology that FinOps teams need to make the best possible decisions.

And there’s more good news! We’re also delighted to announce that the Cost Intelligence and Billing Engine products are now Generally Available (GA) for enterprise organizations. Supporting multi-cloud environments, Cost Intelligence delivers highly customizable dashboards, reports, and best practice checks on costs and resources, as well as cost optimization workflows, while Billing Engine provides comprehensive billing customization and reporting with deep cost analysis and intelligent cost allocation, including chargeback/showback. These products support v1.0 of the FinOps Foundation’s FinOps Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS™) open-source specification, which normalizes cloud provider data to produce consistent cost and usage datasets. Spot by NetApp is a contributing member to the FOCUS working group.

Cost Intelligence and Billing Engine round out the core capabilities of the Spot by NetApp FinOps product suite, which also includes automated commitment management with Spot Eco, and application-aware, AI/ML-powered predictive provisioning and scaling of cloud infrastructure (VMs, containers, Kubernetes), with Spot Ocean and Spot Elastigroup.

Going beyond cost savings to drive FinOps success

While controlling cloud spend remains a key business objective, focusing FinOps efforts on cost-cutting doesn’t get to crux of the problem and may even snowball into bigger problems – especially given the growing complexity of the cloud and the stakeholders involved in managing it.

Cutting cloud costs without fully assessing the impact on infrastructure may disrupt applications and services that are critical to the business. It also creates friction across the various teams who own and manage these services and can drag DevOps engineers and application owners into operational tasks instead of driving and developing innovation.

Moreover, by myopically focusing on costs, stakeholders may not have the visibility and the data to make the right decisions for the business, for the short term and the long term. And paradoxically, by focusing on cutting costs, organizations may actually be leaving money on the table for fear of financial or infrastructure lock-in.

It’s also important to remember that increasing costs may actually be a positive trend, if these costs are the result of business growth. But you need the data and context to fully understand how and why these costs were generated, if they make sense or not, and be able to accurately attribute them to their cost centers.
At Spot by NetApp, our mission is to help our customers solve the root causes of their FinOps challenges and enable them to fully realize the value and vision of FinOps across their organizations. This means taking a holistic approach to FinOps, eliminating the barriers between traditional FinOps and infrastructure management and aligning the teams and tools they use.

Using complete data to make more accurate decisions

The Spot by NetApp FinOps product portfolio does this by providing all stakeholders with a complete, central, and accurate set of metrics that correlate cloud costs and infrastructure data across their multi-cloud environment. This gives stakeholders the visibility and context to understand the impact of cloud purchasing decisions on infrastructure performance needs, and thus be able to make the right tradeoffs and decisions to ensure application performance and reliability while streamlining costs.

Our portfolio also provides automation and optimization technology needed to implement and manage those decisions—be it creating an optimized commitment portfolio, eliminating waste and optimizing resources, or by automatically and consistently provisioning and scaling the most cost-efficient resources to support changing application workloads. Spot by NetApp’s FinOps product suite removes the burden of these tasks, and the friction that goes with them, from cloud cost analysts, DevOps teams and other stakeholders, as well as the risk of service disruptions and delayed deployments.

Ultimately, with Spot by NetApp, organizations can achieve the greatest cost savings AND the greatest resource efficiencies, while optimizing the infrastructure that supports business-critical application workloads for performance, reliability, and cost-efficiency.

Making FinOps accessible and pervasive across the organization

Solving the root causes of FinOps issues requires an integrated product offering that provides visibility and analytics and optimizes cloud costs and infrastructure continuously, consistently and efficiently. Spot by NetApp goes beyond providing the depth and breadth of technology capabilities that address the many requirements of FinOps in one solution. The data and the collaborative approach that underpin the Spot by NetApp FinOps product suite provide the foundation to enable our customers to create and continuously evolve a framework for implementing FinOps across their organizations.

To truly achieve success, FinOps must be ingrained within the organization’s fabric. However, this is an ongoing process, not something that happens overnight. Having accurate, objective and trustworthy cloud data allows all stakeholders to get on the same page. With Spot by NetApp, stakeholders will know exactly who is consuming which cloud resources and why and can allocate costs accurately and transparently to the right cost center. This ultimately helps drive alignment and a culture of shared responsibility and accountability for the cloud across the organization and removes many of the underlying causes of disagreements and friction between the various teams managing the cloud.

Supporting our customers wherever they are on their FinOps journey

FinOps is a journey – a journey that’s different for each organization. Making customers’ data infrastructure more seamless, more dynamic, and higher performing is the raison d’être of NetApp. And as part of NetApp’s Intelligent Data Infrastructure portfolio, the Spot by NetApp FinOps product suite is key to helping all our customers as they navigate through their cloud journeys.

For those of you making the journey to San Diego, make sure to stop by our booth – G6 – to see the Spot by NetApp FinOps product suite in action. And don’t miss our customer panel discussion “Journey to the Center of FinOps with Duolingo, Instructure, and Ticketmaster”, on Thursday, June 19 at 9:45 am.

Learn more about the Spot by NetApp FinOps suite.