Top 10 Cloud Financial Management Tools For Australian Businesses in 2024

However, as cloud adoption grows, managing cloud costs has become more challenging and complex. This complexity is why cloud cost management is now a top priority for CIOs who need to understand the true ROI of their cloud operations.

What is Cloud Financial Management? And Why?

Cloud Financial Management (CFM) is the discipline of overseeing and enhancing financial activities associated with cloud computing. It entails modifying conventional financial practices to accommodate the fluid and intricate aspects of cloud environments. CFM typically includes the following key aspects:

• Cost Transparency: Providing clear visibility into cloud costs. This includes breaking down expenses by service, project, team, or department, making it easier to understand where money is being spent.
• Cost Control: Implementing measures to keep cloud spending within budget. This may involve setting up budgets, alerts for unusual spending, and using cost-saving features offered by cloud providers.
• Cost Optimization: Continuously seeking ways to reduce costs without compromising performance or capabilities. This can include rightsizing resources, using reserved instances, and identifying unused or underutilized resources.
• Financial Planning and Forecasting: Predicting future cloud spending based on current usage patterns and business growth. This helps in budgeting and ensuring that financial resources are allocated effectively.

Read more: How Does Public Cloud Computing Work?

What Are The Top Cloud Financial Management Tools?

SmartOSC

If you want to learn or need help with cloud financial management solutions for your organization, SmartOSC is ready to assist. As a leading digital transformation agency specializing in cloud computing services, we can assess and plan your cloud consumption professionally, continuously monitor costs and minimize cloud spending waste.

Our approach provides enhanced transparency and precise reporting, enabling you to understand costs across various platforms and vendors better. This early visibility into spending issues allows for prompt corrective actions.

With more effective cloud financial operations (FinOps), you can identify the optimal mix of workloads to migrate to the cloud, maximizing the return on investment from your cloud initiatives.

Read more: The Secrets to Optimize Cloud Budget for Your Business

AWS Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Explorer is a native tool provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that assists businesses in managing their AWS spending. It offers cost reports, analytics, cost forecasting, and budgeting tools, along with recommendations for cost optimization, including rightsizing instances and planning reserved instances. AWS also provides an API that allows you to access Cost Explorer data through other AWS reporting or analytics tools.

Kubecost

Kubecost is a cloud financial management tool specifically designed for Kubernetes clusters. It provides insights into Kubernetes resource usage and spending, allowing businesses to optimize their Kubernetes costs. Kubecost offers real-time analysis of Kubernetes spending, detailed reports, and analytics, and recommendations for cost optimization, such as identifying inefficient resource usage and suggesting better allocation.

Cloudability

Apptio Cloudability is a platform that enhances visibility and governance across cloud environments. It helps organizations optimize their cloud resources for cost, speed, and quality, offering budgeting, forecasting, and rightsizing features.

Cloudability has a strong FinOps focus, helping executives correlate cloud spending to business value and enabling Finance teams to track and forecast cloud spend accurately. However, the tool focuses less on linking cost changes and recommendations to implementation, leaving the engineering team to decide which recommendations to accept and how to act on them.

CloudZero

CloudZero is a cloud cost visibility and intelligence platform that automates the collection, allocation, and analysis of cloud cost data to uncover savings opportunities and improve unit economics. Key features include data normalization, cost allocation, cost optimization suggestions, and cloud budget management. 

Densify

Densify, also known as Intel Cost Optimizer powered by Densify, is a cloud and container management platform that automatically optimizes Kubernetes resources and configures cloud instances. 

Using Machine Learning, it performs deep analysis of workload characteristics and cloud provider capabilities, continuously matching cloud applications and services to the right cloud infrastructure. It supports multiple cloud services, making it suitable for multicloud and hybrid cloud architectures.

CloudCheckr

Developed by Spot by NetApp, CloudCheckr is a comprehensive cloud management platform designed for large enterprises and Managed Service Providers (MSPs). It offers features to optimize cloud spend, enhance security and compliance, and improve overall cloud governance. 

CloudCheckr provides deep insights and analytics into cloud usage, supporting multi-cloud environments and offering a unified view to manage and govern AWS and other public cloud services.

Datadog

Datadog is a popular monitoring and observability tool that aggregates metrics and events across the full DevOps stack. While not purely a cloud financial management tool, Datadog Cloud Cost Management helps optimize cloud spending by delivering cost data with resource-level context, such as CPU, memory, and requests. It helps allocate cloud costs and make better cost decisions with confidence. 

Harness

Harness is a CI/CD platform that manages cloud costs, focusing on cost transparency, optimization, and governance. It offers features such as Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Feature Flags, Cloud Cost Management, Service Reliability Management, Security Testing Orchestration, and Chaos Engineering. Harness suggests workload optimizations for savings and helps shut down idle cloud resources, though it lacks some key cloud automation features and cost optimization tools.

Flexera

Flexera aims to improve visibility, allocation, and efficiency of cloud spend at scale. It provides actionable recommendations, budget controls, and cost policies to help your organization avoid surprises and reduce unnecessary cloud spend. Flexera also offers automation tools to act on recommendations, making cloud optimization and governance more scalable and efficient.

Conclusion

SmartOSC is a global development agency providing scalable, cost-effective, and top-tier enterprise cloud computing services. We offer a wide array of customizable solutions to assist with your cloud financial management needs. So don’t hesitate to reach out to us anytime to discuss how we can help.