CloudBolt styles itself as the cloud ROI company – a statement that it brands with an appropriately bold trademark™.

The company pledges to be ‘singularly focused’ on solving the most pressing problem with cloud today i.e. increasing return on investment (ROI), hence the tagline.

Now looking to define the FinOps (operations practices executed with a view to financial management and company expenditure) landscape with its announcement of an upcoming series of Augmented FinOps capabilities throughout 2024,  CloudBolt Software is making use of advancements in AI and ML in line with what it says is ‘industry-leading’ orchestration capabilities to extend FinOps capabilities to any cloud at every stage of the resource lifecycle. 

The company states that these advancements stand to help place value at the center of all cloud decisions for all users.

What is FinOps?

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. 

CloudBolt claims that ‘traditional’ FinOps solutions have consistently underwhelmed and under-performed by only focusing on a retrospective analysis of a company’s cloud spend. The team points to research which shows that 82% of companies now have formal FinOps practices in place, but 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, 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 magical analyst house Gartner Inc., “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.” 

What is Augmented FinOps?

“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

“CloudBolt is transforming the way we manage our cloud resources by simplifying our automation and orchestration tasks, while their FinOps integration is giving us better control over costs, ensuring optimal financial efficiency,” said Cory Moore, Vice President, Infrastructure & Cloud Operations at BeyondTrust. “We’re excited about where CloudBolt is headed and look forward to the new capabilities to help us further maximize cloud ROI.”

The CloudBolt CEO says that, for so long now, companies were told to move everything to the cloud at any cost, because everyone was convinced they should be thinking cloud first.

“Our goal is to empower organizations to shift their mindset from cloud-first to cloud-right,” enthused CloudBolt CEO Craig Hinkley.

CloudBolt works closely with the FinOps Foundation as a premier member. The organization is a part of The Linux Foundation’s non-profit technology consortium focused on advancing the people and practice of FinOps.