World’s leading research and advisory company, Gartner, held a conference on IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies in late November 2019 in London.

The influence of digital business, cloud computing and hybrid IT creates significant “cascade effects” that must be tackled by Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) leaders in 2020 and beyond. The market has been disrupted in recent years, spurred by the rapid growth of the cloud and the shift to hybrid IT. Today, infrastructure is everywhere, and the pace of change for I&O will only increase in 2020 as IT leaders face pressure to more quickly create, deploy, manage and govern dynamic application environments.

In order to keep with the latest trends in Cost Management Frameworks, CloudVane representatives attended the Gartner conference. This provided the opportunity to talk face-to-face with leading experts in the field and discuss CloudVane’s potential and market fit, as well as bring you highlights from the conference.

The keynotes

The opening keynote, titled “I&O 2025 — Reimagine, Revitalize, Re-energize“ was primarily focused on these issues. Key takeaways can be summarized and, as per Gartner’s top Analysts suggested:

• Focused and unique leadership of I&O
• Create an environment conducive to risk taking – today’s disruptors are tomorrow’s digital leaders
• Prioritize innovation delivery over infrastructure management

Another Gartner’s Keynote: “The Art of I&O Culture Hacking” was focused on the I&O leaders.  The entire culture needs to evolve and not doing so is a big barrier to success. It’s easy to say, but difficult to know where to begin. This Gartner Keynote provided some pragmatic steps leaders can take now to help shape and change behavior to impact culture. Key takeaways were:

• Know what your business vision is and align everything you do as I&O to this vision
• No one else will solve the culture puzzle for you – you must engage
• Take a collaborative approach and be the catalyst for change in your organization

Cloud Management Platforms

Changes in I&O are ground-breaking thus the technology needs to follow. The leaders who need to provide automation, governance, life cycle management and brokering across multicloud resources are discovering cloud management platform markets that will meet their needs. However, they need to be aware of the dynamic nature of the CMP space.

Key features and compatibilities that Cloud Management Platforms offer are:

• Provisioning and orchestration
• Service request management
• Inventory and classification
• Monitoring and analytics
• Cost management and resource optimization
• Cloud migration and backup and disaster recovery
• Identity, security, and compliance

Three main technologies which Cloud Management Platforms encompass are:

1. Digital Experience Monitoring–real user monitoring and synthetic monitoring
2. Application discovery, tracing and diagnostics–byte code instrumentation
3. AIOps–anomaly detection and root cause analysis

The focus is on the agility to enable new cloud native deployments, with security in mind.

How to implement a public cloud adoption framework?

The answer is not an easy one as it affects the entire enterprise cloud strategy! In a nutshell, there are five steps, each carrying its own set of rules and expertise needed for the execution:

1. Develop Cloud Strategy. Cloud skill sets are a necessity here, regardless of whether you have them in house or working with a trusted partner. From there on, you need to establish the assessment methodology and develop documented business strategies.
2. Build Cloud Foundations. Once you have selected the providers (Oracle, Azure, AWS, etc.), you are adopting their native tooling and integrating them with your core infrastructure.
3. Design and Mitigate Risks. As we go into multicloud options, the infrastructure and security must be applied to all your organization infrastructure processes.
4. Enable Governance. As governance methodologies and strategies are in place, the financial management process comes in place. For most organizations this is the most challenging part.
5. Achieve Operational Excellence. Workloads are mostly automated, and consumptions are monitored and optimized.

Cost management framework

An operating model for the cloud that brings together Finance, Technology and Business is called FinOps. During the conference, there was a lot of discussion about FinOps and its place in today’s cloud business.

When it comes to the public cloud IaaS/PaaS there are two main areas on which you should focus. The first one is planning, in which you:

• Collect requirements
• Design with cost in mind
• Use cost calculators
• Pilot consumption
• Compare providers
• Determinate PAYG or commitment

The second one is tracking. Here you set up the entire tracking strategy, define the most valuable metrics and create alerts.

Stephanie Gooch, Senior DevOps Engineer at KPMG presented a case study on this topic titled “The Road to FinOps at KPMG”. As business grows, so do the costs. This affects all organizations, from small businesses to large corporations. KPMG used FinOps, the operating model for the cloud to accelerate innovations, while regulating and commercializing costs for their internal applications.

During the conference, Neos CEO Davorin Capan had a 1-on-1 meeting with Chris Saunderson, Sr. Director Analyst for Gartner. Chris is an expert in building automation teams and site reliability engineering, and his insights on the future of FinOps will surely prove to be useful in planning the roadmap for CloudVane.

Conclusion

Cloud Management Platform is a necessity for your business. CloudVane is a tool that can help you cover all areas when it comes to the cost management and your future strategy.