so let's get started uh Rohan I'm going to ask the first question maybe at a very high level just to bring everything in macro focus and then we'll dive back into details but why is cloud insights a strategic comparative what do we mean by modern it asset management and where does cloud insights fit in that Spectrum yeah that's a very good question and Victor I would like to start from the um statement that we with the cloud Journey customers have already adopted the cloud or they are very actively on their digital transmission Journey so there is no question whether they will adopt the cloud or not it is all about expanding the cloud adoption and a lot of times when we are expanding the cloud adoption the the the spend on the cloud increases over time and what's starts happening is the same problems that we used to have with the traditional ID asset management will start coming up in the cloud environments as well for example the decentralization of this technology the the whole purpose of this being more agile Cloud being more easy to um adopt um brought so many advantages to the companies they became more agile they became they started releasing their products much more faster all of that is good however that decentralization also started bringing up more problems around how do we manage this band how do we manage those assets in the cloud from a security perspective from a governance perspective so there was always a need of being able to control everything uh from one place be able to have insights from a central perspective but then it was not the right time it was not the right time to be able to control all of these but now now that customers have already adopted the cloud they understand the economics of the cloud it is becoming much more relevant in the market and that's why it is such a strategic imperative with it Asset Management because these were the same prints principles that people have learned or customers have learned over time the goals are the same if you talk about on-prem infrastructure or on-prem data center the goals are the same if there is a asset somewhere out there in my environment and it has a financial um it has a financial aspect to it I should be managing it as an asset if it has a security risk I should be managing it or at least I should have visibility into it even if I am not directly managing it if even if it is a decentralized infrastructure I'm fine with that that could be my company policy because it is helping my company grow but at some point somebody should have a overall picture of the entire infrastructure and that's what I mean by saying that it is a strategic imperative because you um Can leverage all the benefits that a decentralized structure or a cloud environment can bring to your company but at the same time have those policies and have those lessons that you have learned through IIT Asset Management uh be applied to the cloud environments as well nice so you talked a little bit about some of the main objectives in Cloud insights and having similarities with that of of software asset management or Hardware Asset Management really the visibility of tracking assets can we can we jump a little bit deeper and specifically call out use cases or uh actual goals that that some folks have with Cloud insights I think you touched on those I'd like to jump in a little deeper on those yeah um so one of the goals that um every company usually starts with and we can call it as the um if we want to divide it into uh crawl walk run phases the crawl phases where companies would just try to understand as a central organization how much are we spending and which in the cloud and which teams are responsible for that spending so you should be able to correlate the cloud costs to your business centers in fact some more mature companies correlate these Cloud costs to the use cases or the business uses or the application benefits that they are achieving for example sometimes uh customers start or people start to think that increase in the cloud spend is is probably not the right thing they are losing control on the cloud spend or whatever the reason could be so it has a negative connotation to it whereas if you think carefully about it if this increase in Cloud spin is helping you grow your business if you are able to correlate the unit economics that um the the amount of money that you're spending in the cloud is also increasing the revenue that you're generating that's not a bad um that that's not bad right that so it's just all about the basic correlation uh of how much you're spending in the cloud and what value it is bringing to your company so that should be the very first goal around it and then you can then build up on this goal and you can start having other goals like if I have a pretty large Cloud environment am I making the best use of that environment can I find Opportunities to start saving um or or stop wasting um the cloud resources in fact a pretty interesting we just keep on focusing on the on the money that we're wasting or the spend that we are letting uh go away uh usually in these Cloud environments but then there are new use cases that are coming up for example the ESG the environmental impact Cloud resources every major cloud service provider be it Azure Google or AWS all of them are now focusing on how much this how what is the impact on the environment of their Cloud resources so it's not just about um about increasing the spending cloud and how can we control the waste it is all about it is also about other initiatives that are becoming more relevant in this environment um so so so I think coming back to your question about the particular goals I would say with the very beginning the very start is to be able to correlate um I'm not using the word allocate I'm still saying that even if you're not mature enough to start allocating at least you as a central team should have information to be able to correlate what you're spending whether this spend is bringing value to you or not and if it is not bringing value how can we start not cutting those expenditures got it got it so so having visibility correlating understanding your Cloud inside infrastructure environment and then from there advancing to hey how am I spending where where am I where can I cut waste and then even to something like ESG like you were saying expanding into even more more use cases so there's definitely a lot of development Evolution that someone can take in a cloud insights Journey right and I I would I was still um I forgot to bring out one more Point here is that a lot of organizations um as I was talking about crawl walk run phases a lot of organizations have become mature enough to get control onto um the the allocation perspective part of it or correlation part of it that this is the cloud spend that I'm spending on these business units and they also uh get the optimization recommendations that okay if these resources are not being used I can potentially save this much amount of money or I can potentially shut down these number of machines so that my environmental impact is low however just getting the information and turning it into action is a whole different game and turning it into action is where I want to stress really heavily because till the time I mean if you are just looking at the potential savings and you're not able to take any actions you're not able to report back to your Executives right those who are looking for for goals and kpis that okay it's good to see that I can save 200 000 but have you saved even even a penny right and that's where we operate State uh comes into play the the third one on the slide deck um where you can create more and more automation so that the the recommendations that you're getting to save money can be executed automatically or even if they're not getting automated at least the people who are working on those recommendations to to take the action have all the relevant information they can take those actions faster and Achieve those savings yeah yeah that's a good point that there are individuals that need to understand and what is the progress being made with the investment in Cloud insights right so you're doing all this activity you're saving all this money or or you have the ability to save all this money but are you actually either a taking action and B reporting the the savings and success along the way so so that's a good that's a good segue into our next segment actually in terms of understanding who are the folks that are responsible for carrying out uh this type of uh activity and who are the folks that you should be reporting back to so who are the stakeholders what are their roles and responsibilities um so with that said why don't I ask a question like like this who who are the folks that we should have in a in a cloud infrastructure environment that we should be working with and and you know having a Thor you know having some sort of um activities and and explaining back what we're saving on uh first from that right um so I think the the very foremost the most important Persona that you should be um you should be focused on or you should be asking for uh support is the executives there should be a drive from the executive Executives that um either that goal could be having as I said before having a central visibility into how much you're spending in the company so that you have the leverage to negotiate the prices with your cloud service providers right if you do not know if you just think that you're spending fifty thousand dollars in as a company for Azure you cannot go back to them and ask for discounting discount on the skews and all right but if you start looking at your environment DP and you find out that there's fifty thousand dollar Pockets like there are tens of pockets of fifty thousand dollars it becomes a totally different story and you can then just go back to Azure and you can go back to AWS and ask for the the negotiations and discounts on those prices so I think there should be first of all um a good sponsorship from the executives that is applicable to all the programs whether we're talking about Fin Ops whether we are talking about traditional ideas and management and all those things um so keep that in mind that that's definitely Executives and the second thing that we are seeing here is um the Persona of cloud operations or phenops uh finops might be a new term um however the the origination is the the ITN Finance or the procurement teams which started getting their bills more frequently on a monthly basis from cloud service providers and they wanted to understand that that that are we paying um the the payments that we're making to these cloud service providers are they going in the right direction do we even know uh which teams are using them can we start asking them for um accountability and all those things so this push started coming from the I.T Finance teams because they were approving those uh those bills and those purchase orders and so that's where these ID Finance teams started working with the cloud operations teams to understand um hey guys these are um these are the bills I want to correlate them with the resources that you have in the cloud and that's where these two people started talking to each other and that um that phenops organizations or finops Frameworks started coming up and so I would say that a number of companies have now adopted these phenops Frameworks so this Persona has also become really important so the finops person will be the mediator between your Finance teams and the cloud operations teams and they will be the people who create Frameworks who will create uh policies how the whole function of cloud cost management should work there are a lot of teams with the it Asset Management teams have have have come up to become phenops teams as well um but in some other cases these phenops teams are separate from it Asset Management teams and the reason um and there's a reason why these two teams should be talking to each other because there is so much common knowledge if shared between these two personas you can bring a lot more value to your organization so do not ignore the it Asset Management teams if you have a finops teams or if you have evolved a phenolph streams from your idea asset management team then you're good to go however um just to summarize everything back um executive sponsorship is most important and after that phenops or it asset management and finance themes are really important pieces of this um Persona puzzle and then there are some other stakeholders or other teams that you should also be keeping in touch is the cmdb or ID Discovery team risk management team security teams these teams can also benefit from the information that you have um in the its management organization yeah thank you Rohan so so um I want to go back to the executive sponsor piece if I'm a new customer or if I'm looking to expand in the cloud insights area what are the types of conversations I should be having right how do I secure executive sponsorship commitment and then along the way how do I maintain it because a lot of times you know we get a lot of executive sponsorship for a lot of our programs or projects but it just kind of Fizzles away and and you know they either lose interest or they change directions in terms of what is important to them how do we how do we maintain that conversation with them um yeah so one of the ways um that could be very effective is um to create the sense of accountability across the organization so if the uh conversations that you're having with Executives is around um um is around let's let's bring the whole spend management of the cloud environments into one place and hold the teams accountable for that spend um and not let them drive this uh I mean they can do individual application teams can drive the Innovation they can drive the pace at which they innovate and they release their products however when it comes to having a better control on how much they can spend and and what is the best way to spend in the cloud let's bring that control back and then we can hold them still so they use those resources so I think the executives will understand this term uh or these type of conversations better that we are not taking control from our application teams all we're asking for or all we should be driving as a company is to have um have some sort of accountability um they should be answerable uh to questions like why are we spending a probably a little bit more on certain projects which were the prioritized from an executive perspective right so those type of things ring the bell in these in the minds of these Executives where they try to because they they have the more strategically they have the high level View and they say that okay these let's say applications order processing application uh reservations tons of applications that they have in the environment and they know which one needs Focus which one does not need much focus and they want to allocate the spend they want to allocate the budget accordingly so if you bring those type of conversations towards them and they understand that they can start having control this way and they can hold those teams accountable that's what becomes a more effective conversation they become more interested in that that's one way um of approaching these Executives there are so many others but I just give you one example okay okay great now I appreciate that Rohan thank you for sharing that I think I think with any program Sam ham Cloud insights executive sponsorship is key right and then as you called out there are other commonly involved stakeholders that you might even see in other areas of its asset management but then similarly there's other stakeholders that either they're not always involved but either benefit from information that you can share with them with respect to in this case Cloud insights right so security vulnerability vendor management and risk management when we think about again just the importance of managing costs in the cloud I'd like to just drill into this a little bit further with you Rohan why don't you give us just a quick answer um which which clouds does cloud insights cover let's just kind of touch on that just to make sure people know yeah um at this time Cloud insights application supports the three major Cloud providers AWS Azure and Google um so these are already GA we are already supporting these three cloud service providers um some others are on our roadmap but these three were the top ones and one thing to keep in mind is that the the major benefit that you get from softwares like cloud and science is being able to manage hybrid Cloud environments and in case of in case of um Cloud insights on servicenow platform you are in fact getting a better opportunity to manage hybrid infrastructure not just hybrid Cloud but hybrid infrastructure on-prem and Cloud altogether um so and the reason of the importance of hybrid Cloud environment is of course that the the when you start allocating the cost so imagine that your team one has is using all three cloud service providers right depending on the services that they acquired maybe Azure is better for something Google is better for containers blah blah blah so they have spent in all three Cloud environments now when you are as a central I.T team trying to allocate or correlate the spend for this particular team it is really hard to go into each one of those portals figure out how much the spending filtered around the data exported to excel math and then send it back to them right so that takes so much effort what hybrid Cloud environment spend management will bring is just one single pane of class not a single pane of class but also the way you talk about Cloud spend the methodologies you create all the that is the same so it's all tied in no I like that and that's why it's important um I mean if you have most companies they might have a primary Cloud that they try to focus on we're hearing that but there's also going to be you know those other clouds and use cases where it makes sense to have those um stood up as well yeah so Rohan I want to talk now about goal setting um so I'm going to get started as a customer in my in my cloud infrastructure in my cloud insights project if you will and I wonder I want to do everything right so if I want to do everything is there a better way of just saying hey I'm going to go reach for the stars and you know track all my cloud spends is there more methodical way about going about setting up your goals for clouded sites yeah there is and there must be um it is um it is it is um I mean it is very important to have goals but also it is very common that people forget about setting the goals before uh venturing into a particular space and that even happens with the cloud cost optimization class Cloud cost management space so there will be certain situations where someone will go into a conference or learn about phenobs or sessions like these um and come back with the with the message that there is so much waste in the cloud and I want to just save it and so unrealistic goals or some things that are um not uh very specific uh creates a lot of problem for example um let's say I went into a conference by Gartner or Forrester and I came back with the um with the message that 30 of the spend can be saved right and I create this as a goal I want to cut my cloud spend by 30 because that's what analysts have told me in the conference right this is not a realistic goal I mean not literally it is really realistic but you have to have a phased approach towards it right so what could be a phased approach what could be more realistic way of approaching this and is this the is this the very first step you would like to take probably not so what you need to do as a company is create your own roadmap and a lot of times people create road maps and they then try to um correlate the things with the product roadmap as well like the tools that they're using I'm not just talking about service now but any tool that you may have even an Excel sheet so you should also be careful about what is the products roadmap along with with your own roadmap so things that are achievable with your goals and with the goals of the product is going to bring you the most success so um maybe the first step should be that I want to manage the cloud spend in a specific way right so if you want so so that is the first first step that you want to manage the public Cloud spend Second Step could be that you want to save on that public Cloud spread and the third step could be that you want to create budgets for those um application teams in your company but how do you approach all these three phases right so the very first goal instead of having it to be more broad make it narrow say I want to start allocating monthly Cloud costs to begin with just two business units and C learn from them if they are okay with the information that I'm sharing with them do they have any feedback once I have good control on those two business units or cost centers then I will start expanding into the rest of the company so maybe the first three months would be just learning from two two business units and expanding into the rest of the team in three months you got this much you started doing allocations agriculars will be happy because they see the impact that you promised right now you move on to the second step of start saving the money also look at what your products can help you do it whether one product can do it or three products will be quite into it right and how do you how do you strategize around that um so now maybe the next focus is not cutting the spend by 30 but the next Focus could be um start savings by right sizing over provisioned only compute resources not all the resources just the computer resources that you're focusing on right and then continue it for three more months then once you have a good control on that you can pick up the next resource like databases or whatever you have in the environment maybe you do not want to do that just stay on compute and also execute in third step and then do the cycle again all over again so that is the way there is the phase approach that I I try to suggest my customers in my conversations with customers yeah I hope that resonates I think that was really well said Rohan I I was kind of captivated by the way that you you structured that because I think I think the way that you have to think about this is you need to be intentional right you need to just not cast a wide net and think that hey I'm gonna get get whatever I can and that's going to be successful I think you need to start very small very prescriptive and even if you're getting noise from the background that says hey why are you starting so small I think it serves two purposes one is to demonstrate that you can do it and two is to to demonstrate that if we did this in a larger scope we would get very similar if not better results right so I think that's a really great way of thinking about how to set any type of goal when it comes to its management and Rohan if I could jump into it it feels like uh I don't ask my five-year-old that just who just learned how to ride a bike I'm not asking her to go off you know large jumps and do tricks at the age of five right she's learning how to round the corner and have you know still have some speed and go up and down Hills like we're not hitting bike jumps yet and so in the same way uh we want to be we want to we want to get good at the basics and understand you know the mechanics of finops right and and then we get into those those um those larger yeah I would say more highly mature uh use cases where you're gonna see a lot large uh larger optimization so that's that's a great I'm just pulling that example out of my personal life here but hopefully it's irrelevant as well yeah that's good I like that okay cool so so Rohan um you set the stage for how to set goals what I'd like to do now is maybe jump into uh the product and and let's demonstrate a little bit how to to go about from the goal setting aspect into um getting some results so maybe you can walk us through how Cloud insights works from a very high level uh and then from there let's let's jump into the to the product yeah sure so I'm sharing my screen now um this is the cloud insights application within servicenow platform um and on the landing page by the way I'm not doing a complete demo of the application so I'm just going to hit on a couple of use cases which could be very relevant and maybe that's that's the way you can start your goal setting right so I'll just uh quickly go through the landing page and after that I'm going to be use case so on the landing page we are giving you information about um your hybrid Cloud cost management um all the three cloud service providers that we support here are right here if you just want to focus on one of them you can select one of those otherwise you are getting a Consolidated view into your hybrid Cloud environment you can see how much you're spending on a day on a monthly basis on in the last 30 days this is how much you spend and as compared to this last 30 day spend in future how much you can save if you perform any of these optimization actions like right sizing or changing the infrastructure configuration uh business hours or schedule the resources to be on or off during certain times unused machines removing the machines which are never being used or making use of your reservation plans um so you can click on any of these and go into further details what I will do for today's session is pick up on the scheduling um processes again I'm going back to the same con same topic I was um well I focused on in the in the very beginning of this session that taking the actions making it easier to take those actions is going to be the really uh is going to be the game changer um if you just see how much you can save and you cannot do much about it um there's no point right so let's keep that mindset here right so I'm going into the business hours um case here um again you can summarize with the UI later on but um I will straight away go into the actions so what I'm I can do here in in this product is that I can create policy I can tell the system when the machines should be up and running and when the machines should be shut down so that I don't waste spend during non-business hours during the hours when those machines are not really required now there are a lot of times questions being asked that this is a cloud environment we mostly have all the machines running all the time right which is not true it is just a perception machines are not required to be running all the time there are certain themes um or almost every application team has a Dev environment every application team has a uit environment those environments can be shut down maybe production can never be shut down but Dev environments can be shut down right so you can definitely save on those type of resources so what I will do here is just um create a policy to um for my AWS environment um and say schedule for weekdays right and this will my intention is that I will schedule my AWS resources to be only running during weekdays and a certain period of time right so here um I will give an order run order is important because if the same resources are shared amongst policies then based on the execution order they will be prioritized right um again something that you will understand once you get more familiar with the product but for now just um imagine that I have given order in which these policies should be executed one after the other so in this case I'm only creating this polish for AWS so I will select that provider in the service accounts I have multiple service accounts at AWS one of the service accounts that I'm responsible for as a com um as a teammate is the rewards processing application so I will filter down only those resources which fall in my service account so if I'm the admin I can create policies for all the service accounts but let's say for now I'm focusing on just the rewards processing which is the environment that I am responsible for or application I'm responsible for right and even within rewards processing I only want to focus on resources which belong to Dev environments right so I can filter the resources by saying that all the resources which have a tadpole environment um and the value is Dev um I want to create this policy and once I'm done um setting up the properties of that policy I can then select here what is the type of uh the policy it is so there can be three types of policies one is the report only where I just want to see the data how much I'm spending in business hours versus how much I'm spending non-business hours once I have confidence looking at the data that I can shut down the machines during non-business hours I will then convert them into either a manual change approval process or an automated change process this is where the action or operate States comes into picture becomes much more important is that you are telling the system that you have to go through a change approval process so the approval workflow people who should be approving these type of changes uh people who should be asking you questions all of that is just routed through a change record now you are not exchanging emails with those people you're simply allowing them to collaborate with you in the platform right so I'll first of all um as a first step I would just go with a report only the safest option I just want to monitor how much I'm spending in the cloud during business hours versus one business hours so I'll select report only and I can select what is my schedule what time should this machine be up and running and that is my 8 AM to 10 pm on weekdays Eastern Standard Time there are many other business hours schedules all the schedules in the servicenow system can be created and once they once a business schedule is created you can make it based on fiscal year you can basically make it based on different types of things business hours or scheduling is pretty robust in the service now platform so once you have defined that schedule it will show up here in this drop down and you can select that once it is saved it will start calculating your spend the information that it has downloaded so far it will start calculating based on that how much you have spent during business hours versus one business hours I'll give you an example so let's say um now I have created a report to see how much I'm spending in a business hour versus one business hour so you will get data something like data like this so in this case I have already selected a particular policy which I'm interested in the one that I created um order state so the one I created just during this demo was rewards processing it will take some time so I'm opening up existing one so this one is the one that I created early in the morning uh it was uh called order status production and in this case you can see you can see how much you're spending during non-business hours which is the the salmon color and the other one is the business hours which is the blue color and evaluate uh how your spend is trending across these two these two categories of powers in this case what I'm seeing here is that my spend during non-business hours is also pretty high which could mean two things one is that my machines are required to be used during those non-business hours so maybe I need to tweak my schedule and say that these machines should be running during a certain hour other than what I have selected so now the benefit here is that the policy that you created as a report only before you really take actions before you convert into action you can understand uh what is the perfect business schedule for you once you have decided that this is the schedule when these machines should be running you can then go back to it modify your um let's pick up one of these um modify the policy and say in the modification now I do not want the 8 to 10 weekdays ESC because that was the graphs were showing me that I'm spending uh money or I'm using those resources during other hours as well so I will modify this I will change a different I will switch it to a different business hour schedule right and once I change to that then I want to perform the automation behind the scenes I will say that power on the machines during this time using this flow um and these flows are already defined in the servicenow platform um you can modify them but they are already available out of the box so power on Flow will tell you what uh which actions should be taken to start the machine and stop uh flow will tell you which actually will be taken to stop the machine so what will happen in the end is using these policies now that it has become a it will go back now that it has become uh sorry now now that it has become a auto approval policy um this is going to take these actions will take um will happen automatically and and we will start saving money um in the in the product and you can visualize that on the dashboards too so that's one example um of um leveraging the automation creating rules in the system so that you can start saving money um as soon as you implement the product that's great I think one of the things that I took away with your demonstration there is the actions can be as simple as just visibility report information to me all the way to let me do some manual activities based on the data I'm getting all the way through to hey now that I know now that I have studied this fairly well and I know what's happening I can automate action in the background so I don't have to worry about that anymore because I vetted that policy I understand it and it's going to work on its own I can focus on other policies or other activities right so that's kind of the workflow if you will um yeah how you should manage that exactly and this is going back to the same things that we discussed around goal setting that when you set the goals you should be um it is hard to win confidence right so the people who are asking or who are suggesting that we can save money by changing the infrastructure um the engineering teams will not accept that um except that that statement blindly right they they need you need to build confidence with them so once you take these these type of phased approaches that let me analyze the data first let me do something called reporting only and then share that information with you then we tweak we work with each other we tweak things then we make it a manual process where you approve it once you are satisfied then once I'm I'm I've learned from your manual approval process that you always approve these type of recommendations you have confidence in these type of recognition then I can automate that process rather than going all the way on automation doing something wrong losing the confidence is losing the executive sponsorship and the program program plates yeah yeah no that's that's very clear and that makes a lot of sense so you're bringing in data um you're you're looking at the information and then you're taking action I think that's very clear very good um so in that slide what I'm um I mentioned is um that if you think really hard sit together both the teams the finops or Cloud Center effects in those teams and the item teams if you look at the charter uh their goals are pretty much common uh except a few things that have changed due to the evolution of the technology right um the the item teams had the responsibility to forecast how much the it spending will be they had the responsibility to distribute the spend across the entire organization allocation right they had the responsibility to reduce the waste in software licenses um likewise there's so many things that the item teams used to do and now phenops teams also have to do the same things right uh it's just that item teams are still struggling with audits that was the only thing that clouds and reflexes themes are not doing right um so so this this impo this slide is very powerful to to give you the context that the lessons that you have learned can be reused do not have to reinvent The Reel because your goals are common goals are same and it's you know Roman it's almost it's almost as if uh the itm teams if you've been a practitioner for you know 15 20 years you've got a you've got a 10 or maybe even a 15-year Head Start uh on on the same kinds of disciplines right that you might have on the cloud Center of Excellence only five or seven or you know maybe nine years at the earliest adopters so I think there's there's a lot of overlap and lessons to learn so this is this is excellent