Cloudability
Cloudability is a software vendor that provides financial management tools for monitoring and analyzing cloud computing costs. Information technology (IT) administrators can use Cloudability software to track their public cloud spend and help plan budget for cloud services.
Cloudability was founded in 2011 by Mat Ellis and J.R. Storment, and its headquarters are in Portland, Oregon. The company's cloud cost management tools are primarily used by IT and finance professionals. Specific features of the Cloudability cost management platform include:
- Customizable dashboard provides a graphical view of an enterprise's key performance indicators (KPIs), including monthly cloud spend and estimates.
- Alerts let users know if they have almost exceeded their budget for a particular cloud service account.
- Daily email reports inform users of daily cloud service usage and costs trends across their business.
- Allocation and chargeback allows users to track cloud usage and costs by specific business users, departments or teams.
The Cloudability platform is designed to work with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud and Microsoft Azure. Provider-specific features for AWS include Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cost Analytics and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Usage Analytics, which helps users identify EC2 cloud resources that can be downsized or turned off. Cloudability also has an AWS Reserved Instance Planner tool that guides users through the Reserved Instance buying process.
Cloudability offers two pricing plans: Pro and Enterprise. Both plans follow an elastic pricing model, where monthly fees are based on the amount of cloud costs that users monitor. The Enterprise plan, however, comes with additional features and a higher level of support from Cloudability.
Cloudability and FinOps
In order to generate more more awareness about the need for companies to manage cloud service budgets, Cloudability has helped to create a framework designed to break down silos between software development teams, IT operations and finance. The framework is called FinOps.
The goal of FinOps is to provide better communication between finance and IT teams and give both teams insight into the specific costs associated with delivering IT services, both in house and in the cloud. To that end, the framework addresses three areas of concern: better visibility into a company's cloud spending, more accurate prediction of cloud resource demand and a governance layer to support interaction between finance and IT teams.
Cloudability is a founding member of the FinOps Foundation, a nonprofit industry group that encourages organizations to network and share best practices for IT procurement. Founding members include Joseph Daly, director of cloud optimization services at Nationwide, as well as several other individuals with similar roles at companies such as Atlassian, Autodesk and Spotify.
