Optimize cloud costs: Using automation to avoid waste – Enterprise License Optimization Blog
Business challenge
Spend management by vendor
The future is hybrid. Break down the walls between ITAM and FinOps to drive more revenue, more customer growth and mo…
What do transformative initiatives such as GenAI, machine learning and sustainability mean for the cloud? Check out the 2024…
Support
Services & Training
Find a curated series of actionable and objective insights for IT executives and their teams. Get expert insights from…
How are ITAM professionals optimizing IT assets? Check out the 2024 State of ITAM Report to discover the latest trends.
Social responsibility
The unparalleled synergy of Flexera and Snow provides the Technology Intelligence you need for more efficiency, insight and…
FinOps
Cloud cost optimization is a primary goal of most FinOps practices. While FinOps teams often start with manual steps to shut down unused or underutilized resources, they quickly discover that waste keeps coming back as developers and IT continue to deploy new cloud resources. It can feel like a never-ending game of whack-a-mole to uncover and eliminate inefficient costs.
Automation is an important tool to prevent and eliminate inefficient use of cloud resources and keep cloud costs from getting out of control. Fortunately, you don’t need to wait until you’ve reached a magical level of FinOps maturity to implement automation. The FinOps Framework highlights automation opportunities at the Crawl, Walk, and Run stages of maturity.
Here are a few detailed recommendations for automating at each stage of your FinOps journey.
If you are early in your FinOps journey, you likely have significant spend on compute and storage resources that are no longer used. Often there are compute instances that were spun up for development, testing, or demo purposes, but were never shut down after the development or testing was completed. Another common area for waste is storage buckets that have been provisioned but aren’t being used.
You will want to collaborate with the relevant stakeholders to agree on rules that work for your business. For example, you might agree on a policy with your development teams that instances in development accounts that are unused for the previous 48 hours will be automatically shut down. Alternatively, you could notify the instance owner after 24 hours and then shut it down automatically after 48 hours.
How to automate:
If you’ve begun using Reserved Instances or Savings Plans, make sure you maximize your utilization of these commitments. Low utilization of commitments means that you are wasting money you’ve already paid to the cloud providers. Allowing commitments to expire for even a few days or weeks without replacing them can also cause unexpected spikes in your cloud bill.
How to automate:
Even in the early stages of your FinOps journey, you can use budget alerts to notify you if you are forecasted to exceed your budgeted cloud spend in any given month. By getting alerted, you can identify any unexpected costs and take action to bring your spend back in line with your budgets.
How to automate:
Learn more about the FinOps capabilities from Flexera.
Many organizations have applications that don’t need to be running 24×7. The most common example of this is development instances which are not needed when developers aren’t working. However, you may have other applications that are only needed during business hours and can be shut down after hours or on weekends. Keep in mind that running an application 12×5 (12 hours a day for 5 days a week) can save 65% versus the cost of running 24×7.
How to automate:
Cloud providers offer the option to include commercial software like Windows Server, RedHat Enterprise Linux, SQL Server, and Oracle Database as part of your cloud services. The cost of these software packages is also much higher than the costs of the underlying cloud infrastructure and can represent a significant portion of your cloud bill.
By default, you will be billed directly by the cloud provider for these software licenses on an hourly basis using “pay-as-you-go” (PAYG) prices. Unfortunately, for instances that are running 24×7, these PAYG prices can be 6 times more than your negotiated discounts from the software vendors.
Alternatively, you can change to a bring your own license option (BYOL) and use licenses that you have already purchased from the software vendor, which can represent as much as 85% savings. However, developers and IT staff often don’t know when to choose BYOL and instead leave the PAYG default resulting in higher costs.
What to automate:
As more and more workloads are deployed in the cloud, it is very common to find that you are paying for larger instance sizes or higher resource tiers than are needed. This results in wasted spend that could be recaptured by rightsizing.
You will want to gather information about overprovisioned resources and collaborate closely with your DevOps teams to determine where rightsizing is feasible
What to automate:
As you progress in your FinOps maturity, you will make extensive use of Savings Plans and other commitments like Reserved Instances or Committed Use Discounts. Managing and optimizing these commitments and ensuring they are full utilized becomes more and more complex for large environments.
Automated tools can continuously analyze your environment, make recommendations, and even take automated actions to buy, convert, and sell commitments.
What to automate:
With the rapid adoption of Kubernetes, optimizing these environments can result in significant savings and better performance. FinOps and DevOps teams must work together to evaluate how automated tools can help you optimize Kubernetes clusters and choose the best purchase options, including on-demand, spot instances, commitments and savings plans.
What to automate:
Flexera offers a comprehensive set of FinOps solutions that can help you at all stages of FinOps maturity. Identified as a leader in both the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud Financial Management and the Forrester Cloud Cost Management and Optimization Wave™ Report, Flexera provides solutions that help you optimize your cloud spend.
Get a demo of Flexera’s FinOps solutions.
Technology is evolving rapidly—and it’s important to stay on top of the latest trends and critical insights. Check out the latest blogs related to FinOps below.
FinOps
March 12, 2024
FinOps
February 22, 2023
FinOps
February 9, 2022
FinOps
FinOps
February 24, 2025
FinOps
February 7, 2025
Get updates delivered to your inbox
© 2025 Flexera. All Rights Reserved.
source
This article was autogenerated from a news feed from CDO TIMES selected high quality news and research sources. There was no editorial review conducted beyond that by CDO TIMES staff. Need help with any of the topics in our articles? Schedule your free CDO TIMES Tech Navigator call today to stay ahead of the curve and gain insider advantages to propel your business!
Spend management by vendor
The future is hybrid. Break down the walls between ITAM and FinOps to drive more revenue, more customer growth and mo…
What do transformative initiatives such as GenAI, machine learning and sustainability mean for the cloud? Check out the 2024…
Support
Services & Training
Find a curated series of actionable and objective insights for IT executives and their teams. Get expert insights from…
How are ITAM professionals optimizing IT assets? Check out the 2024 State of ITAM Report to discover the latest trends.
Social responsibility
The unparalleled synergy of Flexera and Snow provides the Technology Intelligence you need for more efficiency, insight and…
FinOps
Cloud cost optimization is a primary goal of most FinOps practices. While FinOps teams often start with manual steps to shut down unused or underutilized resources, they quickly discover that waste keeps coming back as developers and IT continue to deploy new cloud resources. It can feel like a never-ending game of whack-a-mole to uncover and eliminate inefficient costs.
Automation is an important tool to prevent and eliminate inefficient use of cloud resources and keep cloud costs from getting out of control. Fortunately, you don’t need to wait until you’ve reached a magical level of FinOps maturity to implement automation. The FinOps Framework highlights automation opportunities at the Crawl, Walk, and Run stages of maturity.
Here are a few detailed recommendations for automating at each stage of your FinOps journey.
If you are early in your FinOps journey, you likely have significant spend on compute and storage resources that are no longer used. Often there are compute instances that were spun up for development, testing, or demo purposes, but were never shut down after the development or testing was completed. Another common area for waste is storage buckets that have been provisioned but aren’t being used.
You will want to collaborate with the relevant stakeholders to agree on rules that work for your business. For example, you might agree on a policy with your development teams that instances in development accounts that are unused for the previous 48 hours will be automatically shut down. Alternatively, you could notify the instance owner after 24 hours and then shut it down automatically after 48 hours.
How to automate:
If you’ve begun using Reserved Instances or Savings Plans, make sure you maximize your utilization of these commitments. Low utilization of commitments means that you are wasting money you’ve already paid to the cloud providers. Allowing commitments to expire for even a few days or weeks without replacing them can also cause unexpected spikes in your cloud bill.
How to automate:
Even in the early stages of your FinOps journey, you can use budget alerts to notify you if you are forecasted to exceed your budgeted cloud spend in any given month. By getting alerted, you can identify any unexpected costs and take action to bring your spend back in line with your budgets.
How to automate:
Learn more about the FinOps capabilities from Flexera.
Many organizations have applications that don’t need to be running 24×7. The most common example of this is development instances which are not needed when developers aren’t working. However, you may have other applications that are only needed during business hours and can be shut down after hours or on weekends. Keep in mind that running an application 12×5 (12 hours a day for 5 days a week) can save 65% versus the cost of running 24×7.
How to automate:
Cloud providers offer the option to include commercial software like Windows Server, RedHat Enterprise Linux, SQL Server, and Oracle Database as part of your cloud services. The cost of these software packages is also much higher than the costs of the underlying cloud infrastructure and can represent a significant portion of your cloud bill.
By default, you will be billed directly by the cloud provider for these software licenses on an hourly basis using “pay-as-you-go” (PAYG) prices. Unfortunately, for instances that are running 24×7, these PAYG prices can be 6 times more than your negotiated discounts from the software vendors.
Alternatively, you can change to a bring your own license option (BYOL) and use licenses that you have already purchased from the software vendor, which can represent as much as 85% savings. However, developers and IT staff often don’t know when to choose BYOL and instead leave the PAYG default resulting in higher costs.
What to automate:
As more and more workloads are deployed in the cloud, it is very common to find that you are paying for larger instance sizes or higher resource tiers than are needed. This results in wasted spend that could be recaptured by rightsizing.
You will want to gather information about overprovisioned resources and collaborate closely with your DevOps teams to determine where rightsizing is feasible
What to automate:
As you progress in your FinOps maturity, you will make extensive use of Savings Plans and other commitments like Reserved Instances or Committed Use Discounts. Managing and optimizing these commitments and ensuring they are full utilized becomes more and more complex for large environments.
Automated tools can continuously analyze your environment, make recommendations, and even take automated actions to buy, convert, and sell commitments.
What to automate:
With the rapid adoption of Kubernetes, optimizing these environments can result in significant savings and better performance. FinOps and DevOps teams must work together to evaluate how automated tools can help you optimize Kubernetes clusters and choose the best purchase options, including on-demand, spot instances, commitments and savings plans.
What to automate:
Flexera offers a comprehensive set of FinOps solutions that can help you at all stages of FinOps maturity. Identified as a leader in both the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud Financial Management and the Forrester Cloud Cost Management and Optimization Wave™ Report, Flexera provides solutions that help you optimize your cloud spend.
Get a demo of Flexera’s FinOps solutions.
Technology is evolving rapidly—and it’s important to stay on top of the latest trends and critical insights. Check out the latest blogs related to FinOps below.
FinOps
March 12, 2024
FinOps
February 22, 2023
FinOps
February 9, 2022
FinOps
FinOps
February 24, 2025
FinOps
February 7, 2025
Get updates delivered to your inbox
© 2025 Flexera. All Rights Reserved.
source
This article was autogenerated from a news feed from CDO TIMES selected high quality news and research sources. There was no editorial review conducted beyond that by CDO TIMES staff. Need help with any of the topics in our articles? Schedule your free CDO TIMES Tech Navigator call today to stay ahead of the curve and gain insider advantages to propel your business!
