Novis Cloud Controller for Finops and better use of the cloud

Did you like our article?

FinOps, or financial operations, is a practice that emphasizes the importance of updating traditional methods of infrastructure expense management to avoid high cloud bills, as the move to public clouds seems to be an unstoppable trend in the technology market.

In large clouds, the latest technologies are hosted and at a very low cost, from advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, tools for IOT, as well as SAP solutions and many useful services. Not to mention that almost all new developments and applications are hosted there. The clouds allow to mount numerous project platforms in parallel and use pay as you go pricing models, to schedule the platform depending on the availability of development teams. A managed public cloud allows the deployment, scheduling, and backup of transient development platforms to be done without significant costs. In this way, multiple projects can move forward based on their own development capabilities, multiplying the output capacity of the same budget.

As companies move their applications and workloads to the public cloud, the task of controlling and optimizing their costs to ensure efficient resource utilization in a highly dynamic environment becomes increasingly essential. And it becomes more complicated when workloads are distributed between different accounts or even between different clouds. In these cases, achieving a single point of review becomes a highly complex problem. The solution lies in robust and effective cost management that provides visibility and control over spend across all cloud environments used, especially when it comes to SAP cloud solutions. This is what we talked about in the article How to have visibility and control over the cost of SAP cloud solutions.

Cloud operation presents significant challenges, which can be grouped into three parts: cloud infrastructure optimization, cost management and security. Each of these challenges is addressed by Novis Cloud Controller (NCC), Novis’ cloud optimization platform, which is already operating in more than 40 companies.

Optimization of the cloud infrastructure:

The use of the cloud requires very precise management of the infrastructure being used. In contrast to on-premises infrastructure, inefficient use immediately results in cost overruns (on-premises in the medium term as well). To handle this in a simplified way, NCC evaluates numerous efficiency indicators, such as CPU utilization, reservation management, backup policies and many others that, if properly managed, allow to substantially reduce the cloud cost without losing any functionality. The evaluation of efficiency indicators is performed simultaneously on the three major clouds (GCP, Azure, AWS) for those clients operating in a multi-cloud environment.

Cost management in the cloud:

In addition to efficiently using resources, it is extremely useful to be able to analyze where they are being consumed, in which units or projects in the company and determine where costs are increasing and where they are improving. Many companies run multiple projects in multiple clouds and need to know if those costs are evolving as expected.
NCC generates trend dashboards with analysis of which components are increasing and which are decreasing, making it easy for project managers to visualize trends and verify whether original budgets are being met. In this way, by monitoring efficiency and costs, companies can keep a granular and effective control of their cloud usage, as well as being an important input for project post-evaluation.

Cloud security:

NCC integrates the information provided by different World Class security solutions developed by Microsoft, such as the multi-cloud Defender for Cloud and the multi-platform Defender for Endpoint (leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant 2023). These products, powered by the most modern Threat Intelligence, will deliver multiple indicators of the different layers of Security, allowing you to get a 360-degree and centralized view of the security status of all your platforms (even in hybrid and multi-cloud deployments). This information is available in NCC and allows you to make efficient use of resources, prioritizing efforts in the areas of the architecture that require it, facilitating decision making and reducing cybersecurity-related risks.
Life in the cloud is a constantly evolving journey where optimization, cost control and security play a crucial role. At Novis we are committed to improving our clients’ experience by developing the necessary tools for optimal management of the cloud environment.

Please contact us for more information about our services.

Feedback/discussion with the author: Patricio Artiagoitia, CEO Novis.