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Carahsoft's AWS FinOps Solution
1. What is the service/solution?
At Carahsoft, we believe that effective cloud financial management is about more than just cutting costs—it's about optimizing your AWS investment to support your mission-critical objectives. Carahsoft is now offering a full-fledged FinOps program aimed at both lowering your cloud costs, but also optimizing your resources in accordance with AWS best practices. Our team of AWS FinOps specialists employs a comprehensive strategy for cost allocation. By leveraging advanced AWS tools and services, we offer an architecture assessment, identify key opportunities for cost optimization, right size AWS resources using AWS best practices, create comprehensive forecasting to predict future spending, and create budget-friendly strategies without compromising on performance or security.
2. How is it implemented?
Our standard operating procedures include a full CUR (Cost and Usage Report) breakdown, a TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) writeup, an actionable list of savings recommendations, and a forecasted result of the money saved broken out by month and by service. Custom billing can be achieved through AWS Billing Conductor and customized business intelligence, or tracking can be achieved through AWS QuickSight. We then leverage additional native AWS tooling, including AWS Health, Trusted Advisor, and many more, to tailor a solution that aligns with your unique needs and goals.
The timeline for this project depends on customer requirements, but we can typically complete a full FinOps CUR breakdown, report, and dashboard in under a week. Although the cadences continue until the desired outcome is achieved, we continue to provide ongoing support.
3. Benefits, etc.
The main value-add surrounding the Carahsoft FinOps service offering is our ability to strategically save our public sector customers money, allocating more funding towards mission-critical workloads. The second main benefit of our FinOps service offering is that we can display to customers their true costs, in near real-time, without having to manually filter the distributor’s charges (Carahsoft). Many 3rd party cost management tools can achieve the same results, although typically run with a 1-1.5% additional fee. We can achieve this for end user customers without the use of a 3rd party. The third benefit of our FinOps service offering is that it provides customers with a clear, fully customizable view of their spend, allowing them to make informed decisions about their IT infrastructure. This is achieved using a combination of technology and human expertise, which allows us to identify areas where customers can save money and improve their efficiency.
4. Results
After implementation, we expect to have not only saved money for our public sector customers but to have also taught a skill. We want our customers to leave with the ability to control their AWS financial operations. In the end, customers will have received a breakdown of their CUR, a list of actionable recommendations from Carahsoft, a forecast of predicted spend with and without savings, and the ability to leverage AWS native tooling for better financial management. Customers should leave with a new skillset in effective cloud financial management in accordance with AWS best practices.
