Exstratus
Leveraging Business Value through Cloud FinOps

Despite the fact that operating a business in the cloud has become a standard part of the IT playbook, only one of three companies are achieving the benefits that they expect. This is largely due to the difficulty companies have understanding and managing cloud costs. Unfortunately, not only does this overshadow the cost saving improvements that drove the initial cloud adoption, but also makes it difficult to quantify the business value of the cloud and to justify future investments.

Enter Exstratus, Cloud Cost Optimization and FinOps leaders, to help companies align their significant cloud spending with the most valuable business objectives while protecting the cloud operations necessary for engineering to execute at scale. Leveraging extensive cloud native engineering experience, financial expertise and deep analytics, Exstratus assists its clients to coordinate IT and Finance cloud management driving maximum profitability of cloud investments as they grow.

“We’re focused exclusively on cloud cost control and FinOps,” says Philip Flesher, President of Exstratus. “Unlike generic cloud integrators and consultants, all of our expertise and technology is leveraged toward this one specialty, which gives us tremendous advantages in driving FinOps adoption and best practices.”

FinOps engagements begin with a hands-on assessment to identify immediate cost reductions enabled through usage optimizations, architectural enhancements and rate improvements. With a proprietary data analytics platform that identifies faulty cloud design patterns and savings opportunities, Exstratus analysts have access to constant, real-time monitoring of every resource in a client’s cloud infrastructure.

A recent project by Exstratus helped a client save over a million dollars a year by implementing a deep analysis of their AWS storage service. Exstratus found that changing storage types quickly resulted in massive cost savings. By implementing a new rate card, identifying possible overspends, and funding innovation, they improved profit margins and grew the business exponentially.

These initial financial wins can quickly drive adoption in the larger FinOps initiative. An important piece of this is linking cloud costs and essential business metrics to derive a true unit cost for the business.

This unit cost metric is critical to measure both the ROI of the changes being made as part of the FinOps initiative and to have a common value metric as the engagement expands. Armed with timely and accurate data, as well as organizational agreement on the KPIs that drive the business, Exstratus works with the client’s Engineering and Finance teams to ensure that cost control is constant and thorough.

Unlike generic cloud integrators and consultants, all of our expertise and technology is leveraged toward this one specialty, which gives us tremendous advantages in driving FinOps adoption and best practices

In addition to immediate cost optimizations and business value positioning, Exstratus works with companies to prepare their cloud investment for anticipated growth and scale. While rapid growth can threaten margins as cloud costs soar, Exstratus clients can now forecast unit costs (cost-per-usage/volume) and derive unit margins in scenario planning and what-if analyses. These insights provide the foundation for more accurate budgeting and forecasting.

As companies grow, the complexity of managing the costs and operations of their cloud also grows. To maintain the benefits of speed and scale that motivated both cloud-native and cloud-migrated companies to build in the cloud while controlling their costs requires an oversight and expertise cost optimization practices alone cannot provide. As a full-service Cloud FinOps partner, Exstratus allows companies to offload the hard work of cost optimization, architecting for scale, vendor negotiation, discount management, real-time reporting, and accurate budgeting and forecasting so companies can be confident in the health of their cloud investment. With this, they can focus on building products and providing services that satisfy the needs of their customers.