AWS Cloud Financial Management
Take a sneak peek at AWS re:Invent 2020 Cloud Financial Management Sessions
What do you miss most about re:Invent? For those of you who haven’t been to one yet, re:Invent is a conference hosted by AWS for the global cloud computing community. Each year tens of thousands of customers and partners from around the globe gather in Las Vegas for a week of “jam packed” launch announcement, education, networking, and most importantly fun activities.
There is an inside joke that employees would “age” 5 years after the re:Invent week, because of the constant go-go-go triggered by our adrenaline rush to deliver a great event experience for our customers and partners. However, nothing could beat the opportunities to have direct and candid conversations with customers and partners in the dining hall or expo center, and to witness the excitement after each launch announcement and in the hands-on sessions, such as builder’s, Jams and GameDays.
To make sure we provide a safe learning experience for our customers this year, we have converted re:Invent to be a virtual conference. The event will be free (exclamation mark) and offer content throughout Nov.30 – Dec.18. What is more exciting is that rather than making hard decisions to choose and commute between sessions, you can comfortably consume all the content you are interested in, as sessions will be broadcasted multiple times in a “follow-the-sun” fashion.
Breakout Sessions
Breakout sessions are in my opinion the bread-and-butter of re:Invent. Domain experts designed and incorporated the latest product capabilities, research findings, and customer feedback into condensed yet consumable learning sessions. You can find breakout sessions across solution tracks, industry, or audience focuses.
Below are five featured cloud financial management sessions you can add to your to-watch list.
As your team build on the AWS platform, e.g. launching and maintaining websites and applications, storing and analyzing terabytes of data, you want to provide the freedom your builders need, while maintaining control of your cost, so you can avoid billing surprises. In ENT 201 – Billing Control and Cost Management, we will share how you can establish the guardrails with tools, such as AWS Identity & Access Management, AWS Organizations, set and manage spend expectations with services, such as AWS Budgets, and enhance cost control with AWS Cost Anomaly Detection.
If you have been reading our cost allocation blog series and are interested to learn how all the dots are connected, I’d recommend ENT 210 – Cost Allocation Best Practices. You will learn about how to establish your cost allocation structure, the things you need to consider, and the AWS tools you can use to start allocating today. You can also learn what tools you can use to report back your allocations in order to create the level of cost visibility and accountability for your organization.
While you are adapting your existing planning process to meet the variable and dynamic nature of cloud resources adoption, there are opportunities to rethink the way you view your IT expenses and start running your IT like a business. ENT 212 – Improve Strategic IT Planning breaks down all the key components for your IT planning. It will walk you through how you can make better investment decisions with business KPIs, establish targets to measure your performance with benchmarking data, and improve your forecasting accuracy with trend-based and/or event-driven methods. You can also learn how to tell the story of IT value not IT cost with the insights you need.
Speaking of shifting your mentality from viewing IT as a cost center to a value driver, you don’t want to miss ENT 212 – Identifying and Realizing the Business Value of AWS, where we share data-driven methodologies of how you can identify and quantify the values of your cloud investment, build your own AWS business value case with metric insights and tools, e.g. AWS Migration Evaluator, and learn the principles of Cloud Financial Management needed to realize these business value.
Finally, your technology finance should be governed from both ends: cost as well as revenue. Attend AIM208 – Catch more potential online fraud faster with Amazon Fraud Detector and learn how you can use Amazon Fraud Detector, a fully managed ML service that builds the fraud prediction based on your historical data and Amazon’s own insights, to prevent, detect, contain, and remediate fraudulent activities.
Streaming Schedule
As mentioned, all sessions will be broadcasted multiple times around the clock. For each breakout session, during the initial broadcast, an expert panel will be available online to answer your questions live. If you’d like to interact with our experts live, I’d highly recommend you registering for re:Invent now and marking your calendar for the following time slots.
· ENT 201 – Billing Control and Cost Management (Dec.1, 1:30-2PM Pacific Time)
· ENT 210 – Cost Allocation Best Practices (Dec.9, 11:15-11:45AM Pacific Time)
· ENT 212- Improve Strategic IT Planning (Dec.15, 10:45-11:15AM Pacific Time)
· ENT 212 – Identifying and Realizing the Business Value of AWS (Dec.17, 2-2:30PM Pacific Time)