Using AWS tools to implement your Cloud Financial Management strategy

In today’s global economy, business leaders around the world are re-evaluating and, in some cases, reprioritizing their cloud investments. Now, more than ever, understanding and implementing a comprehensive Cloud Financial Management (CFM) strategy is essential, because it doesn’t just cover cost optimization; it is cloud optimization. It encompasses how you can achieve your business outcomes in the most cost efficient manner, and accelerate economic and business value creation while finding the right balance between agility and control.

The CFM solutions can help transform your business through cost transparency, optimization, forecasting, and control. There’s no specific order of CFM operations. It all depends on what your business needs and priorities are.

Figure 1. The 4 Cloud Financial Management pillars

When looking at your organization, you can ask yourself these questions:

• See: How are you currently measuring, monitoring, and creating accountability for your cloud spend? If you are new to AWS or planning on using AWS, do you have a plan to establish cost and usage visibility?
• Save: What cost optimization levers are you currently using to optimize your spend? If you haven’t started using AWS, are you familiar with common usage-based and pricing model-based optimizations?
• Plan: How do you currently plan for future cloud usage and spend? Do you a methodology to quantify value generation for a new migration? Have you evolved your current budgeting and forecasting processes to adopt variable usage of cloud?
• Run: And finally, what are some of the operational processes and tools you are currently using to manage your cloud expenditures, and who is leading those efforts? Have you put any thought into how things will work from a day to day, operational perspective once you start using AWS?

To operationalize your CFM strategy, you need to identify what tools are available to help you allocate, visualize, and control your AWS cost and usage. Ideally, you’ll use these tools to automate cost management activities, enable scale, identify and implement optimizations, and establish a self-sustaining, cost-aware culture of innovation.

In this webinar, we walk you through an example optimization (using AWS Graviton) to shed light on the framework for how you should think about each CFM pillar and layer tooling into your strategy.

🎞️Watch and learn: Getting started with your CFM journey: AWS tooling demo