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Friction between finance and tech leaders prevents companies from controlling cloud spend

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Vertice, an optimisation platform for SaaS and cloud spend, has unveiled the results of its global survey, ‘The State of Cloud Cost Optimisation’, which reveals that organisations are being held back from controlling their cloud spending and gaining ROI because of a lack of alignment between finance and tech leaders.

Amidst cloud costs rising by an average of 35% year on year, Vertice surveyed 600 senior finance and tech leaders in the US and UK and found that cutting cloud spending was the highest priority for finance leaders, with more than three quarters (78%) listing it among their top three cost-saving priorities and a third (33.5%) revealing it as their number one priority. Only 9% of technical leaders say reducing cloud costs is a top concern; instead, four out of 10 say their priority is hiring skilled cloud employees.

55% of finance leaders blame a lack of transparency from tech leaders, with 44% saying they can’t get visibility of cloud costs. Adding to this misalignment, relationships with cloud hosting providers are highlighted as a major threat to cost efficiency, with 39% of finance leaders finding it difficult to negotiate costs because technical staff own relationships with cloud vendors.  

Alarmingly, over half (55%) of tech leaders say tension is caused by non-technical staff lacking the knowledge or expertise to understand cloud infrastructure configurations. 25% of tech bosses say that finance staff want to reduce cloud spending, but they don’t have the tech or engineering resources to focus on cloud optimisation.   

Leaders of scale-ups were by far the most likely to report high levels of friction, reporting a higher average rating of tension (8/10) than those working in startups (5.4/10) and midmarket-sized companies (6.6/10), and almost twice the intensity of friction than those working inside enterprise-sized organisations (4.3/10).

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To help organisations tackle the challenge of spiralling cloud spending, Vertice today launched its Cloud Cost Optimization platform, which empowers businesses to cut cloud spend by as much as 25%. Vertice, which already helps customers save 20-30% on SaaS spend, has designed the platform to solve the acute problems faced by finance and tech leaders trying to reduce cloud spend.

Vertice tracks cloud usage and spending in real-time in a unified dashboard for finance and tech, removing the barrier between teams and enabling finance leaders to accurately forecast and control spending. It uses automation to ease the burden on busy engineering teams and elevate every aspect of cloud cost optimisation by performing continuous tests to highlight where efficiencies and savings can be made with minimal engineering effort, as well as automatically managing cost-saving plans, known as Reserved Instance (RI) commitments.

Eldar Tuvey, CEO and co-founder of Vertice, said: “Reducing cloud spending is a growing challenge for businesses of all sizes, so it’s concerning to see the disconnect between finance and tech leaders. With companies grappling with volatile cloud bills and costs rising by as much as 500% in a single year for some organisations, it’s critical for CFOs and CIOs to have a unified strategy for cloud cost optimisation. CFOs are demanding access to accurate forecasting, with shared visibility and automation tools to help them act on cost-saving initiatives. This is of course critical for all companies who are struggling to scale their cloud efficiently, as they grow. 

“There are over 200 AWS products alone, which makes managing and reducing cloud spending complex and time-consuming. Automating cloud cost optimisation leads to bigger savings of time and money, and frees up resources for growth and innovation. We are excited by the prospect of helping our customers save up to 25% on their cloud costs.”

Vertice’s Cloud Cost Optimization Survey findings also show:

On different priorities between finance and tech: 

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  • Saving money on cloud was the highest priority among finance leaders, with more than three quarters (78%) of them listing it among their top three and a third (33.5%) revealing it as their number one cost-saving priority.
  • Share of finance leaders listing cost-saving initiatives in their top three priorities:
    • Employee headcount/salaries 75%
    • Software as a Service (SaaS) fees 71%
    • Using Artificial Intelligence to automate tasks 23%
  • Only 9% of technical leaders say reducing cloud spending is a top priority. Tech decision-makers are most concerned with cloud recruitment – with 4 in 10 (40%) saying their key priority is hiring skilled cloud employees. 

On the misalignment between finance and tech:

  • 55% of finance and tech leaders admit there is a transparency/knowledge gap that could threaten the potential of cloud investments and even hold back innovation. 
  • An almost equal proportion of financial leaders (27%) and tech leaders (32%) say balancing innovation and cost is a key cause of friction between them. 

On the success FinOps:

  • Nine in 10 businesses either already have, or desire to have, a FinOps strategy in place, but less than a third have done so successfully. 

On struggling to find time for cloud cost optimisation: 

  • 25% of tech leaders say that finance staff want to reduce cloud spending but they don’t have the tech/engineering resources to prioritise this. 

Want to learn more about blockchain from industry leaders? Check out Blockchain Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California and London.

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TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

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AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.

Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:

Next-generation chips

This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.

The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.

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As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.

Zero-ETL integrations

AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.

A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.

The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.  

Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.

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Amazon Q

A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.

Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

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HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

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Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).

Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.

The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.

Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.

“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”

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Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.

“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”

Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, HCLTech, Hybrid, meetings

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TECHNOLOGY

Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

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Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.

It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.

MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.

Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says

In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.

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With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.

Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.

“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“

MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.

Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

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Tags: automation, Canonical, MicroCloud, private cloud

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