How to Align Cloud Management Best Practices for IT, DevOps, Finance, and Security in the Public Sector

Modern public sector entities often carry the burden of implementing a cloud strategy while fulfilling civic objectives within the confines of fixed budgets, all while maintaining strict regulatory compliance. Although there is widespread private and public recognition of the benefits of cloud-first strategies, there is no well-known roadmap for success.

Further, publicly funded organizations face even greater challenges than their private counterparts because of their constraints, particularly around the variability of costs and loss of centralized control inherent to cloud usage.

Cross-Departmental Alignment

So how do you succeed? The answer is deceptively simple in theory yet difficult in practice. For a successful implementation, the organization needs to have IT, DevOps, finance and security teams all work together. Each needs to cede some authority and accept that the old siloed methods are not conducive to cloud success.

Only by working together can teams answer these questions:

• How can finance help IT make the most of an expiring annual budget?
• Can finance easily provide visibility and thus ownership into DevOps’ budget?
• How does each maintain a lean and highly-productive workforce through automation?
• How does the security team remain comfortable with the organization’s posture?
• How can IT ensure compliance requirements are being fulfilled?

Let’s go over the financial aspects of the solution and how your organization can facilitate communication and collaboration of cloud management best practices between the teams.

Maximizing Finite Resources

Understanding your usage and optimizing your expenses are critical to achieving success. In fact, given the variability of cloud costs, planning for budget constraints should become the top priority. Public sector CIOs feel continuous pressure to do more with less, and must be able to track and account for expenditures related to disparate accounts, projects, services, and more. Managing resources and implementing cloud management best practices used to be a time consuming and manual process before single-dashboard cloud management platforms (CMPs) like CloudCheckr began to provide both real-time resource management recommendations and forward-looking insights.

By implementing a CMP, department leads can rapidly identify and eliminate wasteful spending. This can even be accomplished through automation which, in turn, improves workforce productivity. Automation simultaneously maximizes the return on cloud investment for finance, DevOps and IT teams by simplifying processes and reducing manual effort in cloud management.

Visibility and Accountability Across Teams

Providing visibility is also essential since visibility is the foundation of accountability. CloudCheckr provides tools in this area by incorporating several types of alerts to track burndown, cost spikes, and spend by service, tag, account, and more.

Better yet, it provides real-time spend analysis, sophisticated monthly forecasting tools in a customizable dashboard view, and cross-account insights on projected expenditures based on any pre-configured alerts. A comprehensive suite of invoicing tools allows the finance team to efficiently manage cost and budget allocation – all within the platform, or via data-stream to internal accounting tools.

All of this is designed to allow each team to have visibility and comfort with their financial governance structures. Rather than wasting effort manually tracking and calculating spend, CloudCheckr CMx enables each user and department to focus on fulfilling their respective missions.

Optimizing the Budget

Budget optimization is always critical as public sector resources are finite. As fiscal year-end approaches, budget optimization, forecasting and planning become even more critical. And as stewards of taxpayers’ dollars, government entities are mandated to spend efficiently and defensibly.

With CloudCheckr CMx Federal, a FedRAMP Ready cloud management platform, public sector departments can immediately identify wasted resources. CloudCheckr analyzes volumes of data to:

• Secure reserved capacity
• Right-size existing instances and analyze database capacity
• Identify savings opportunities through de-provisioning idle and unused resources

CloudCheckr also provides daily waste identification reports and alerts as a quick way to check in on inefficient provisioning and prevent unnecessary expenditures. By doing all of this, the finance team receives the cost data necessary to help the IT and DevOps teams make optimal purchasing decisions and maximize resource availability.

CloudCheckr’s cost allocation tools prevent wasteful spending and inefficiencies associated with manually managing public sector deployments. By using CloudCheckr, organizations save an average 30% off their existing monthly cloud expenditure.

Imagine a solution to inventory management and budgetary governance in the public cloud. Now add intelligent resource utilization recommendations, and a comprehensive suite of intuitive billing/invoicing tools—not to mention an expert set of security best practice scans—this is what CloudCheckr brings to public sector clients.

FedRAMP-Ready Cloud Management for Your Agency

Securely govern your cloud infrastructure with the only cloud management platform to achieve FedRAMP Ready status. Schedule a demo to see CloudCheckr CMx Federal in action.