Managing cloud resources efficiently and effectively is a top priority for organizations today. Hybrid Cloud Management X (HCMX) is a powerful solution designed to address cloud financial management (FinOps) and other cloud management requirements in hybrid and multicloud environments.

The latest release, 2023.05, brings exciting new developments that further enhance HCMX’s capabilities in the areas of FinOps and cloud service fulfillment. This blog will focus on exploring our most powerful new capabilities in the FinOps domain.

Discover, Aggregate, and Manage All Your Cloud Accounts

To establish a strong foundation for FinOps, the essential starting point is obtaining accurate spending data for your cloud usage. With that data, you can visualize and analyze your spending, then find a path towards identifying and eliminating waste.

It all begins by extracting billing and owner information from each cloud account in use.

Now you can discover, aggregate, and manage all your cloud accounts across AWS, Azure, and GCP. All the information is at your fingertips. You can download/export data as you need to. You can also manage data within the unified interface. No external tools, such as Excel, are needed.

This advancement enables administrators to obtain and aggregate all relevant account information within a unified interface. Account management becomes more streamlined and enables configuration of owners and notification groups. This is of utmost importance. It ensures that notifications reach the right individuals when actions need to be taken to optimize spending.

Furthermore, accounts can be mapped to cost centers to facilitate chargeback. A centralized dashboard displays quick views by cloud provider, type, and other metrics, making it easy to identify trends and have a consistent overview over all that is happening in the cloud—on the account level.

Overall, our stronger support in account management now allows users to gain control, enhance visibility, and effectively allocate costs across multiple cloud providers.

Set Spending Limits with Forecasting and Advanced Customization

Keeping cloud spending in check is crucial for financial planning and cost optimization. The improved Cloud Cost Limits feature in HCMX empowers you to set spending limits and customize notifications.

When a threshold amount is reached, HCMX automatically notifies account owners or group members via email. What's more, you now have access to forecasted spending information, enabling you to anticipate and adjust your budgets accordingly.

We’ve also added functionality for customizing notification templates and configuring rules that trigger incident workflows (ITSM integration required). This functionality gives you greater structure and control over managing your cloud costs.

The improved Cloud Cost Limits facilitate better budgeting, prevent overspending, and keep individual spenders on track and within budget.

Maximize Discounts with AWS Savings Plan Recommendations

Reservations or reservations-based commitments refer to a pricing model where discounted rates are offered in exchange for pre-purchasing computing resources for a specified duration.

Included in this model are Reserved Instances (AWS), Reserved Savings (Azure), Committed Use Discounts (Google Cloud), and Savings Plans.

HCMX has already offered AI-powered recommendations for all of the above, and has now added support for AWS Savings Plans. The Savings Plans model is different from the other three mentioned above in that discounted pricing isn’t tied to committing to specific instance types or resources.

Instead, Savings Plans give customers the flexibility to apply cloud usage to various types of instances or services. While commitments to a certain amount of compute usage do apply, they don’t’ have to be tied to a specific resource type upfront.

Optimizing costs on AWS is a top priority for many organizations, and HCMX now provides Savings Plans recommendations for AWS to allow customers to unlock further discounts on their AWS bill. These recommendations cover both Compute and EC2-based savings plans, reducing the rates paid and maximizing AWS savings.

HCMX presents all these recommendations in an intuitive and unified interface, making it easy for customers to identify and capitalize on annual savings opportunities.

With HCMX, you can make better informed decisions that more effectively align your cloud costs with your organization's financial goals.

 What Else Is New?

There is more! HCMX now also allows users to:

• Support scaling of data and accelerate time to value for even the largest organizations that require granular insights for their FinOps practices with billing data collection of billions of records and a significant (up to 5x) speed improvement in data synchronization.
• Track cloud spend with views across multiple currencies with an improved Cloud Spend Dashboard, that now supports multi-currency.
• Prevent idle-time and improve scaling to remove AWS spend wastage with an improved scheduler for workload management, now with support for AWS.
• Enforce governance by applying approval policies for user operations with improved approval flows for User Operations that now supports broader day-2 operations.
• Simplify testing of service designs before publishing with improved Service Designs, now with support for 'modify' workflow testing.
• Broaden content support with the addition of GCP database capsule.
• Transition seamlessly from Dev to Prod with Dev2Prod export-import functionality.

For more detailed information about what is new in the HCMX 2023.05, watch the recording of the technical release webinar.

FinOps news, events, and resources

OpenText Is a Proud Sponsor of FinOps X—the Premier FinOps In-Person Event of the Year. The event takes place June 27–30 in San Diego, California, at the Marriott Marquis San Diego Marina. Find more information here.

Check out our FinOps Virtual Forum that took place on May 3–4, 2023. We had a thought-leadership session presented by David Linthicum on May 3 and an OpenText FinOps showcase session the following day.

View all HCM blog posts here.

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For any other questions or a free demo request, please don't hesitate to reach out to us. We'd love to hear from you!