Moving to the cloud brings undoubted benefits in terms of efficiency, agility and innovation, but many companies find it hard to control and optimise cloud expenses. According to Gartner research, 60% of infrastructure and operations leaders will encounter public cloud cost overruns that negatively impact their on-premises budgets through to 2024.

With cloud turning IT from a capital expense into a variable cost, organisations are billed continuously as consumption occurs when using infrastructure and platform as a service (IaaS/PaaS). In a complex, multi and hybrid cloud environment, enterprises struggle to get full visibility of the costs across multiple service providers. Wastage and bill shock have become all too common for some businesses.

To take charge of the situation, enterprises need more than manual processes and the tools provided by the public cloud providers. They need to embrace Financial Operations (FinOps) culture, processes and tools to get ahead of the complexity, unpredictability and dynamism of IaaS and PaaS pricing and billing models.

A cutting-edge, automated cloud-based expense management solution is an essential part of FinOps, Such a platform enables the IT department to monitor the real cost of the cloud environment as well as to identify cost-effective ways to maximise cloud usage and efficiency. These smarter cost management tools are designed to work across multiple clouds and simplify cost reporting across different providers.

When evaluating cloud expense management or FinOps solutions, companies should seek one that offers real added-value over the cloud providers’ toolsets.   Three core benefits to look out for are:

• The ability to manage a multi-cloud estate within the business’s own context.
• A single and complete view of the cloud environment, resources and spend allocation.
• Automated operations and seamless integration with ERP systems and cloud service providers.

A smarter platform will enable enterprise architects to predict costs and eliminate bill shock across the cloud environment. Such a tool also vastly reduces the manual processes that organisations once needed to carry out to monitor, verify and allocate cost from different providers to the various cost centres and resource groups within the business.