Announcing CloudBolt’s Reimagined FinOps Data Platform with FOCUS Support: Designing for What’s Next

We are excited to announce our reimagined FinOps Data Platform, built from the ground up to address the fundamental big data challenges faced by FinOps teams. Our platform provides a unified view across all cloud spend, aligns with the FinOps Foundation’s FOCUS open data standard, and leverages AI/ML to deliver continuous, proactive cost intelligence. This new foundation paves the way for CloudBolt to rapidly deliver advanced capabilities, enabling organizations to maximize the business value across every cloud.

The Foundation of Effective Cloud Financial Management

Cloud FinOps, at its core, is a big data challenge. As organizations rapidly embrace public cloud, private cloud, and SaaS technologies, the explosion of cost and usage data has become unwieldy. FinOps teams are drowning in billing information from dozens of disparate sources, each with its own data schemas and reporting quirks. Manually stitching this data together via spreadsheets to answer basic questions is complex, costly, and increasingly infeasible at scale.

Without a solid data foundation, even the most committed FinOps initiatives struggle to generate trustworthy, holistic insights to manage skyrocketing cloud costs. As the adage goes, “garbage in, garbage out.” That’s why we believe the beating heart of any world-class FinOps program is the data platform that powers it.

A Forward-Looking Approach to Our FinOps Data Layer

At CloudBolt, we recognize the critical data gap holding FinOps teams back from delivering on their full potential. Existing tools offer limited, fragmented solutions that lock you into a narrow slice of your technology portfolio. However, this doesn’t have to be the norm. We see this as an opportunity to start from a clean slate and completely reenvision what a modern FinOps data platform can be:

• Comprehensive: A single pane of glass across all cloud providers, SaaS applications, Kubernetes clusters, virtualized infrastructure, and custom data sets. No more swivel chair cloud data management.
• Real-Time: An event-driven, streaming architecture that processes cost and usage data as it happens. Say goodbye to stale, after-the-fact reporting that is too late to impact outcomes.
• Intelligent: Thoughtfully designed to incorporate AI/ML that surfaces proactive insights and recommendations.
• Flexible: Adapts to your unique business needs via customizable data ingestion, business mappings, budget hierarchies, and more. Your platform evolves with you as needs change.

By harnessing the power of big data, automation, and AI, CloudBolt is ushering in the next phase of FinOps maturity – Continuous Cloud Cost Intelligence.

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“As a member of the FinOps Foundation’s Governing Board, I’ve had the privilege of working closely with the community to define the FOCUS open data standard. CloudBolt’s re-imagined FinOps Data Platform, built from the ground up to align with FOCUS, represents a major step forward in our shared vision to democratize and accelerate FinOps adoption.”

– Kyle Campos, Chief Product Officer at CloudBolt

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Full Alignment with the FinOps Foundation FOCUS Project

We are excited to share that CloudBolt’s Reimagined Data Platform has been built from the ground up to align with the FinOps Foundation’s Open Cost & Usage Specification (FOCUS) initiative. FOCUS outlines an open-source standard for codifying and normalizing cloud cost and usage data across all major providers. We believe deeply in the power of open standards to accelerate FinOps adoption and are fully committed to supporting the community-driven FOCUS framework.

By natively adopting the FOCUS data schema, common metric definitions, and taxonomies directly within our platform, CloudBolt will help customers:

• Centralize cost and usage data in a single, unified structure across AWS, Azure, GCP, VMware, OpenStack, Kubernetes, Snowflake, Databricks, and more
• Enhance team collaboration by having all stakeholders speak a shared language of cloud costs, utilization, and performance indicators.
• Compare apples-to-apples to make smarter multi-cloud decisions around usage optimization, rate negotiations, and more.
• Develop highly transferable and valuable FinOps data analysis skillsets that work consistently across any cloud or organizational context.

We look forward to continuing to partner closely with the FinOps Foundation to evolve and mature the FOCUS standard as new use cases and technologies emerge.

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“This is just the beginning of CloudBolt’s journey to deliver the industry’s most advanced platform for augmented, AI-driven FinOps.”

– Kyle Campos, Chief Product Officer at CloudBolt

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The Leap to Support What’s Next for FinOps

While CloudBolt’s reimagined Data Platform represents a giant leap forward for FinOps teams, it is only the beginning. We are continuing to rapidly innovate and expand the platform’s AI/ML-powered capabilities to enable exciting new use cases like:

• Ingesting your unique business and financial data to track unit cost metrics that quantify the cloud’s impact on revenue, margins, and other KPIs (e.g., cost per transaction, cost per subscriber)
• Advanced anomaly detection to proactively flag unexpected cost spikes before they spiral out of control
• Autonomous workload optimization to continuously right-size infrastructure based on real-time application performance and business metrics
• Intelligent budget alerts that identify the root cause of potential overages and recommend preventative actions
• Scenario modeling to forecast the cost impact of pending migrations, new product launches, organic growth, and more

Our vision is to make CloudBolt the one-stop shop for end-to-end, continuous FinOps intelligence and autonomous optimization. A trusted copilot that amplifies your team’s ability to proactively steer cloud investments to maximize business value. The technology to make this possible is finally here.

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“In the rapidly evolving world of cloud FinOps, getting the data foundation right is absolutely critical. Without trustworthy, comprehensive, and timely cost and usage data, even the most sophisticated AI/ML technologies will fail to deliver on their potential.

That’s why CloudBolt’s alignment with the FinOps Foundation’s FOCUS framework is so important. By solving the core data challenges holding FinOps teams back, we’re setting the stage for exciting advancements in autonomous cost optimization, intelligent budget alerts, scenario modeling, and much more. FOCUS is an essential enabler for CloudBolt to deliver on our vision of end-to-end, AI-powered cloud cost intelligence. The future of FinOps is bright.”

– Ryan Wrenn, VP of AI/ML at CloudBolt

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We can’t wait to take this journey with you and redefine what’s possible for FinOps. To learn more about CloudBolt’s reimagined Data Platform, talk to us at FinOps X or visit cloudbolt.io/demo today.