CloudBolt Software is redefining the FinOps landscape with its announcement of an upcoming series of Augmented FinOps capabilities coming throughout 2024. Leveraging advancements in AI and ML, and industry-leading orchestration, CloudBolt aims to extend FinOps capabilities to any cloud at every stage of the resource lifecycle. These advancements stand to help place value at the center of all cloud decisions for all users. 

FinOps combines financial management principles with cloud engineering and operations to provide organizations with a deeper understanding of cloud spending and actionable insights to more effectively allocate and optimize cloud costs. Traditional FinOps solutions have consistently underwhelmed and under-performed by only focusing on a retrospective analysis of a company's cloud spend (who spent what and when). While research shows that 82% of companies now have formal FinOps practices in place, only 24% expect to see material impact from it in the first 12 months or less. 

"For years, FinOps teams and IT leaders have grappled with rising cloud costs without a clear picture of the value their investments bring to the business. Companies have been struggling with solutions that have proven to be expensive, incomplete, ineffective, and only solve thin slices of the cloud finance problem," said Craig Hinkley, chief executive officer of CloudBolt. "We're reacting to the market. The new cloud imperative is value-driven decision-making. At CloudBolt, our mission is to make this possible."

According to Gartner, Inc., a research and advisory firm, "Current FinOps implementations fall short in the area of augmented functionality, which provides intelligent observability linked to tailored recommendations and actions that smartly optimize cloud spend." (Gartner, Emerging Tech: Data Management Product Leaders Must Implement Augmented FinOps in Their Cloud Solutions" by Robin Schumacher, Adam Ronthal, October 7, 2022)

Augmented FinOps represents a monumental evolution to cloud financial management.

"For the first time, practitioners will be able to leverage AI/ML-informed insights and apply intelligent automation and orchestration both retrospectively and proactively," said Kyle Campos, CloudBolt's chief technology and product officer. "In doing so, users will finally be able to enjoy complete cloud lifecycle optimization by more rapidly and confidently turning insights into actions that maximize cloud ROI and pave the way for customers to solve higher order business problems." 

CloudBolt's upcoming Augmented FinOps advancements are focused on three distinct areas of differentiating capabilities: 

• AI/ML-informed cost insights for heightened observability and analysis across diverse perspectives
• Full Lifecycle FinOps to facilitate automated, data-driven decision-making across all resource stages and continuously improve cloud ROI
• A unified control framework that converges public and private clouds into one cohesive cloud fabric with a unified access point and user experience

"For so long, so many companies were told to move everything to the cloud at any cost, because everyone was convinced they should be thinking Cloud First," continued Hinkley. "Our goal is to empower organizations to shift their mindset from Cloud First to Cloud Right."