Micro Focus has announced the release of Hybrid Cloud Management X (HCMX) FinOps Express at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations and Cloud Strategies Conference (IOCS).
With an estimated US$1 trillion currently being spent on cloud infrastructure, this new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) release is designed for the financial management of cloud investments to reduce surprise bills and optimise cloud spend.
HCMX FinOps Express is a part of HCMX, which includes multi-cloud design and provisioning capabilities, policy-based compliance, and lifecycle hybrid-cloud service orchestration.
HCMX is a solution that unifies hybrid cloud and on-premises fulfilment operations by providing self-service resource provisioning with built-in transparent cost control and governance.
HCMX is built on the Micro Focus OPTIC platform (Operations Platform for Transformation, Intelligence and Cloud), giving it extended AI, automation, discovery and integration capabilities.
As cloud migrations and digital transformation continue to drive strategic business change, Micro Focus HCMX FinOps Express is one of the ways to help customers support cost-effective migrations, optimises cloud spend, and ultimately lower the total cost of ownership for IT.
“Among many reasons organisations move workloads to the cloud is to reduce data centre costs, but many organisations do not realise the full potential of savings due to inefficient management of cloud operations. HCMX FinOps Express provides CIOs with the ability to optimise and operate their cloud in an agile and controlled manner, while involving all the necessary stakeholders," says Travis Greene, senior director of ITOM product marketing at Micro Focus.
HCMX FinOps Express helps organisations to gain a complete, unified view of cloud spend with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Google Cloud, including show-back, mapping cloud spend to projects, business units, and cost centres.
The SaaS also spot idle, oversized, or overprovisioned resources with reports that help identify spending spikes and inefficiencies. In addition, it takes advantage of the built-in module for budgeting that provides an additional layer of financial responsibility across engineering and other teams.
FinOps Express utilises AI to auto-generate reservation planning recommendations that can help lower cloud rates and save as much as 72%. In addition, it proactively prevents costly surprises by consolidating offerings from major cloud vendors into a single catalogue and excluding expensive or non-compliant options while implementing spending limits.
One significant advantage of FinOps Express is improved cross-team financial collaboration and decision-making. In addition, clients can save time by viewing all data and analyses in a centralised dashboard.
Clients can also lean on AI to auto-generate reservation recommendations calculated based on the actual cloud usage patterns. They can see their real-time optimisation potential using a reservation chart. Timely alerts ensure that clients take advantage of every savings opportunity.
Organisations using FinOps Express can set up spend controls for multi-cloud consumption. For example, it can prevent cloud delivery of costly or non-compliant instances, apply spending limits with warning alerts, and watch reckless acts of provisioning get off the cloud. In addition, it can automate workload shutdown times during idle periods. Finally, it can set up multilevel approvals and other rules to raise spend awareness.