Financial Governance with Maestro: Optimize and Evolve


In our previous posts, we briefly introduced Gartner's Framework for Managing and Optimizing Cots of Public Cloud IaaS and PaaS, started the overview of Maestro as a financial governance tool - from the first step, Planning, and proceeded to Tracking and Reducing.

Now, we are ready to see how Maestro can be useful in the rest of the steps - Optimization and Evolving.

Optimize

Once cost and utilization reduction is quite a technical step, the next one, optimization, often needs changes in architecture, so that the applications need less resources for same or even higher performance.

These are the decisions that are to be made by project teams. However, Maestro has several features that can help you in defining the direction.


  • Within its Optimization reports, Maestro not only identifies low-utilized resources, but also provides the statistics on existing AWS instances purchase options. This allows you to get another perspective of the infrastructure and use this data when planning the architecture changes.
  • Maestro also tracks the utilization of consumption-based services in AWS (load balancers, VPNs, NAT Gateways, and others) – and informs you in case they are underutilized or considered idle. This highlights the possible points for restructuring within your virtual infrastructure which will lead to optimization.


Evolve

This step is the last in the Cloud Cost Optimization journey, and it refers to strategic changes within the organization – from distributing load between different cloud providers to relating specific business KPIs to Cloud costs which would allow to see if your investment into cloud returns as expected.

Evolving sums up all the previous steps and brings their value to the new level.

Maestro, in its turn, can support you with making this step on several options.


  • Maestro not only has its own engines and tools, but it also has dozens of integrations. It takes the best of the industry’s solutions in general, as well as of each supported Cloud provider’s know-hows in costs control and optimization area.

    Currently, Maestro is integrated with 5 AWS, 3 Azure and 2 Google Cloud services used to track, optimize and reduce Cloud costs:

 


  • As the market of Cloud solutions grows, the new Cloud providers arise and evolve, and win their parts of this market. Providers may offer similar services for different prices, and organizations can win from distributing load across several Clouds.

    Maestro as a multi-cloud solution has everything that is needed for quick adapting a new provider, either public or private. With its six-weeks release cycle, Maestro can get the initial integration supporting the basic infrastructure management and billing functionality in less than two months.

    Meanwhile, due to Maestro's unification approach, end-users will feel no to little difference in user experience once your organization needs to switch from one Cloud provider to another one, or expand its Cloud geography.

  • Every organization has its own hierarchy and selects people and roles responsible for specific areas, including finance, operations, architecture etc. Maestro has a flexible multi-layered permissions and access system, which, on one hand, focuses on the user’s tasks for the organization, and, on the other – allows to specify people responsible for each tenant’s financial and security state. Having this implemented, Maestro ensures that the available cost control tools and information reaches the correct persons and then is considered during organization transformation.

Summary

As we can see, Maestro is a Cloud Management Solution that can be effectively used at all steps within the cloud costs management and optimization flow, according to the framework described by the Gartner.

Although not all tools listed in the framework are supported, the available ones build a strong system which provides a single entry point for planning, tracking, reducing and optimizing virtual infrastructures usage and costs.


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