| |DECEMBER - JANUARY8CIOReviewIN MY OPINION5 WAYS TO LOWER CLOUD COSTS WHILE REALIZING VALUE By AJ Wasserman, Product Owner of Cloud Financial Operations, Liberty Mutual InsuranceAs cloud costs continue to rise, many tech leaders are looking for ways to control expenses, but without compromising business resiliency or agility. While the cloud is able to generate tremendous value for companies when done well, controlling and monitoring usage can be challenging and expensive. In fact, Gartner predicts that through 2024, 60 percent of infrastructure and operations leaders will encounter public cloud cost overruns that negatively impact their on-premises budgets.With more than 70 percent of our workloads in the cloud through a hybrid, multi-provider approach, today Liberty Mutual is one of the most experienced and advanced cloud adopters in the U.S. We expect that momentum to continue, despite the macroeconomic environment. In fact, we're currently on track to reduce annual IT expenses by 28 percent by 2024, with the goal of eventually eliminating as much as 40 percent of fixed-run costs through cloud computing. But how? We've been deliberate with our strategy, maximizing the total value by leveraging multiple cloud providers, while optimizing our existing footprint. Throughout our decade-long cloud journey, we've learned how to find significant savings. Following are five things to help tech leaders follow a similar path. Budgeting should be a team effortCloud migration is not without its challenges ­ particularly with keeping expenses in check. According to McKinsey, many companies see their cloud spend grow as much as 20 to 30 percent each year.Understanding the complexities around costs, we created a dedicated Cloud FinOps team. The strong partnership between FinOps, architects, finance, and engineering teams was critical for building the enterprise budget. We have found that the key to success is to partner across our organization to understand workload plans, specifically regarding the cloud provider of choice. This provides a solid baseline for forecasting, which can then be used to drive budgeting. Other companies may consider a similar approach, organizing a cross-functional team to co-create their budget.Creating Cost Transparency Through a Single Pane of GlassEarly on in our journey, we built a single pane of glass to create cost transparency across all cloud providers ­ to better understand our bills, what's important to customers, where our costs are, and how we can optimize. This was important for our leadership and engineering teams to understand the financial impact of their design and deployment decisions as they built and managed solutions for the organization.But, none of the cost and optimization level transparency would be possible without a solid tagging strategy. The public cloud providers supply massive amounts of valuable billing data, but without a strategy to enhance this with other metadata, it can be challenging to use the data effectively and efficiently. The tagging allows us to align resources and spend at the application level driving accurate chargeback and KPI reporting at all levels of the organization.
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