Suresh Mathew, CEO of Sedai and expert in Cloud Management, with extensive experience as an innovator, founder and C-level executive.
In today’s landscape, cloud optimization is essential for businesses to maximize ROI, enhance performance and ensure scalability. Just as education relies on the foundational “three Rs” (Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic), cloud optimization hinges on its own “three Rs”—reports, recommendations and realization.
While companies often excel at producing reports and recommendations, achieving realization remains a significant challenge, leading to persistent cloud wastage. This framework provides a structured approach to address this issue permanently, helping businesses remain competitive and efficient.
1. Reports
Reports are essential for providing in-depth insights into cloud usage, wastage and performance. These reports, whether generated through cloud provider platforms, third-party tools or in-house BI solutions, deliver a comprehensive view of their cloud usage.
Tools And Techniques
• Monitoring tools. Native tools like AWS CloudWatch, Azure Monitor and Google Cloud Operations Suite or third-party tools like DataDog, NewRelic or Prometheus.
• Data visualization. Dashboards such as Grafana and Kibana can translate data into actionable insights.
• Automated reporting. Solutions that generate regular reports and alerts to keep teams informed.
2. Recommendations
Many companies excel at deriving actionable recommendations from cloud optimization reports to enhance cloud efficiency. Typically, they use an impact-effort matrix to prioritize high-impact, low-effort initiatives.
Common Types
• Right-sizing. Adjusting instance/workload sizes for cost efficiency.
• Usage optimization. Implementing scheduled shutdowns and auto-scaling to manage resources more effectively.
• Purchase optimization. Committing to savings plans, using reserved instances/spot instances based on current usage patterns and future forecasts.
3. Realization
Realization—the safe execution of recommendations—is the most challenging phase of cloud optimization due to the inherent risk of disruptions. This is where AI truly excels, ensuring risk-free implementation by minimizing human intervention—a critical advantage I have witnessed repeatedly. Essentially, AI moves engineers out of harm’s way.
Foundational Elements
• Risk management system. Engineers often hesitate to make changes due to the potential for disruption. To overcome this barrier, organizations can implement robust safety practices, with AI and machine learning playing pivotal roles. For instance, adopting smart auto-rollback mechanisms, simple regression techniques to stay proactive and predictive analytics for effective risk management can make a significant difference. Since AI can detect and address potential issues long before customers are affected, it ensures smooth operations.
• Automated rollout and rollback. This applies to both software and configuration. Data-driven validation of plans before approval enables seamless automated rollouts and rollbacks, reducing the risk of errors.
• Safe automation (aka autonomy). Adopting AI-driven automation ensures consistent, reliable execution of recommendations. It minimizes human errors, provides real-time monitoring and allows for on-the-fly adjustments.
This transformation is rarely a one-step process; it’s often a journey. Contrary to what you might expect, it’s best not to begin with a comprehensive assessment. I genuinely mean it—avoid starting with an assessment. Instead, begin by identifying and moving everything that can be made autonomous and then conduct the assessment on the rest.
A Step-By-Step Approach
1. Identify and eliminate first. Start by identifying all frameworks that can be made autonomous and transition them to an autonomous system for ongoing optimization.
2. Conduct a detailed assessment of the remaining areas. Once the autonomous system is in place, perform a thorough assessment of only the remaining areas.
3. Evaluate the need for optimization. Determine whether the ROI justifies the effort required for optimization. Often, the ROI may not be significant enough to warrant further optimization.
4. Monitor and optimize. If optimization is necessary, continuously monitor the recommendations and deploy a dedicated team to carefully implement the optimizations. However, always be on the lookout for opportunities to transition these processes to an autonomous system at the earliest chance, allowing your teams to focus on higher-order tasks.
If you begin with the assessment, it can become a never-ending task—making it unlikely that you’ll complete the journey. This is why optimization efforts in most companies either fail or remain stalled in the assessment phase.
Why Realization Is The Only “R” That Matters
Reports and recommendations are essential, but their value is only unlocked through effective realization. Without it:
• No action. Insights remain ideas, not improvements.
• Endless cycles/incidents. Manual or basic execution traps you in repetition, diluting impact and stalling progress. Your teams will constantly operate under the fear of incidents.
• Sustainable efficiency. Realization, powered by advanced automation, is where optimization truly happens—minimizing errors, maximizing results and ensuring sustainable success.
Realization is the key that turns strategy into reality.
Final Thoughts
If you want to unlock your company’s true potential in cloud optimization, you must tackle the fear head-on. The FinOps Foundation’s 2024 State of FinOps survey revealed that roughly 40% of practitioners face resistance from engineers who hesitate to implement cost-saving recommendations. Introducing an AI co-pilot can eliminate hesitation, empower your team and ensure that optimization isn’t just a goal but a reality.
In the world of cloud optimization, hesitation is the enemy. Embrace AI and turn your optimization journey into a powerful, unstoppable force. The future belongs to those who act.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
