Nordcloud, an IBM Company

25/06/2026

This is where most FinOps journeys stall.

Not because of technology.

Because of how organisations work.

Welcome to the Work Zone:

🌀 endless reporting, no action
🪦 governance ignored in practice
🕳️ accountability that never lands

Effort without impact.

Because FinOps isn’t a dashboard.

It’s a way of operating:
→ shared ownership
→ real decisions
→ alignment across teams

Without that…
you don’t move forward. You orbit the problem.

🪐 Break out of the loop:

👉 Get the FinOps Galaxy Field Guide: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0wstGg0

24/06/2026

Cloud doesn't become expensive overnight.
It becomes expensive when nobody's looking 🥸.

One forgotten virtual machine.

One oversized reservation.

One disk that's been sitting there since a migration two years ago.

Multiply that across hundreds of autonomous teams...
..and suddenly your cloud bill has a life of its own.

That's exactly where one global manufacturing organisation found itself.

Cloud adoption had accelerated, but financial governance hadn't kept pace. Teams made their own cloud decisions, internal billing had become increasingly complex, and no one had a complete picture of cloud consumption.

The answer wasn't asking people to spend less.

It was helping them understand what they were spending in the first place.

Together, we introduced FinOps practices that helped the organisation:
✅ Improve cloud cost transparency
✅ Optimise Azure reservations based on real usage
✅ Eliminate unnecessary cloud waste
✅ Automate VM shutdowns
✅ Strengthen internal billing and cost allocation
✅ Build a culture of cloud cost ownership

The results?
📉 Annual cloud savings through continuous optimisation
💿 10x fewer unused disks (and counting)
🤝 Better collaboration between IT, Finance and engineering teams
📊 Greater visibility into cloud spend across the organisation

Because the best way to reduce cloud costs.....is to stop treating them as someone else's problem.

Read the full story 👇
https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0wqffY0

Learn how a global manufacturing organisation used FinOps on Azure to reduce cloud waste, optimise reservations, improve billing transparency and achieve savings.

22/06/2026

Your factory doesn't stop because your infrastructure needs an upgrade 🤷‍♀️.

Production lines don't wait.

Neither should your technology.

That's the challenge one global ICT manufacturer faced.

Their VMware-based environment had become increasingly expensive, offered limited visibility into factory infrastructure and no longer supported the scale and agility the business needed.

But moving everything to the public cloud wasn't an option.

When milliseconds can mean the difference between smooth operations and halted production, some workloads simply need to stay close to the factory floor.

So we took a different approach.

Together, we designed and implemented an Azure Local platform that enabled:
✅ A complete VMware exit across factory sites
✅ Cloud-enabled operations with Azure Arc
✅ Unified monitoring, governance and automation
✅ Greater transparency for factory IT teams
✅ A scalable blueprint for future factories and workloads

The result?

A hybrid platform that combines the low latency of on-premises infrastructure with the visibility, governance and operational maturity of Azure.

Because modernising manufacturing isn't about choosing between on-premises and the cloud.

It's about building an infrastructure that keeps production moving.

Read the full story 👇

https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0wlrHF0

Learn how a global ICT manufacturer modernised factory IT with Azure Local, exited VMware, reduced costs and gained cloud level visibility in the factories.

19/06/2026

Not all cost problems announce themselves.

Some drift.

Slowly. Quietly. Constantly.

Welcome to The Fog:

🧟 Zombie workloads
📦 Expanding data
⚡ Unexplained anomalies

Still running. Still costing.

The real issue?

They’re hard to see -
because visibility isn’t just data.

It’s:
→ ownership
→ context
→ trust

Without that, you’re navigating blind.

🪐 See what’s hiding in your environment:

👉 Download the FinOps Galaxy Field Guide: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0whj7y0

18/06/2026

Building Azure Local wasn't the hard part.
Building it before everyone else was 🦾.

When Azure Local was announced, there was no playbook.

No established delivery model.

No years of customer success stories to lean on.

So we built one.

Working closely with Microsoft, our customers and the wider partner ecosystem, we helped shape an offering based on something far more valuable than theory:

✔️ Real delivery.
✔️ Real production experience.
✔️ Real lessons learned.

In this blog, our CTO for Microsoft, Petri Salminen, shares what it was really like to build an Azure Local offering from the ground up - what worked, what didn't, and the lessons every organisation should know before starting their own journey.

If you're exploring Azure Local for sovereignty, resilience or hybrid cloud, this isn't another product overview.

It's the story behind the delivery.

Read it here ➡️ https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0wfRNm0

A behind‑the‑scenes look at how Nordcloud built its Azure Local offering through early customer work, close Microsoft collaboration, and real delivery.

17/06/2026

Nobody buys cloud because they want Disaster Recovery.

They buy cloud because the business can't afford downtime.

That's an important difference.

Disaster Recovery is just one piece of the puzzle.

True resilience is about designing systems that keep the business running when the unexpected happens.
✔️ Critical workloads stay available.
✔️ Recovery is planned, not improvised.
✔️ The business keeps moving.

That's resilience by design.

Our cloud resilience expert, Alexander de Jongh, breaks down what resilience really means in our latest infographic, and why thinking beyond Disaster Recovery is becoming essential for every organisation.

Take a look and let us know: what's the biggest resilience challenge your organisation is facing today?
➡️ https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0wd1nt0

This infographic sets out the case for integrating business continuity and disaster recovery.

16/06/2026

🏭 Your factory can't stop just because the cloud has a bad day.

Yet that's exactly the challenge many manufacturers are facing.

How do you modernise SAP, improve resilience and gain cloud scalability without putting critical factory and logistics operations at risk?

A global enterprise running one of the world's largest SAP landscapes faced exactly that problem.
Together with IBM and Microsoft, we helped build a resilient Azure and Azure Local platform designed to combine ☁️ cloud scale with 🏭 local operational reliability.

The result?
✅ Successful migration of around 1,000 SAP virtual machines
🛡️ Multi-region and multi-zone resilience
🚚 Reliable factory and logistics operations
💰 Around 10% monthly infrastructure savings

Because some workloads can tolerate downtime.
Manufacturing operations can't.

A huge shoutout to the experts behind this transformation:
🔹 Amit Dhuri - leading managed cloud operations
🔹 Igor Shastitko - driving the SAP architecture and transformation
🔹 Iwona Kościółek - helping orchestrate the journey from planning to delivery

Read the full story ⬇️
https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0wbbLK0

Learn how a global enterprise modernised SAP on Microsoft Azure and Azure Local, improving resilience, supporting factory operations and reducing monthly costs by 10%.

15/06/2026

Your AI project doesn't need a better model.
It might need a better finance team.

While everyone is debating prompts, agents and model performance, many organisations are missing a much simpler problem:
They don't know where the money is going 💸.

AI costs scale differently.

A single API call is cheap.
Ten million aren't.

And without the right controls, optimisation and visibility, AI spend can grow far faster than AI value.

That's where FinOps comes in.

Not as a cost-cutting exercise, but as the discipline that helps organisations turn AI from an experiment into a sustainable capability.

Read the blog by Jake McCracken to learn how leading organisations are avoiding the financial traps that derail AI initiatives ➡️ https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0w8GRb0

Discover how FinOps for AI helps organisations control AI costs, optimise model usage and scale AI initiatives sustainably without budget overruns.

12/06/2026

Still measuring FinOps success by how much cloud spend you've cut 👀?

You might be optimising the wrong thing.

For years, FinOps has been associated with cost reduction. Turn things off. Trim resources. Reduce the bill.

But cloud, AI, data and security have changed the game.

The real question isn't "How much are we spending?" It's "What value are we getting from that spend?"

In his latest blog, Gabriele Russo explores why FinOps needs to move beyond chasing savings and start helping organisations make smarter investment decisions across cloud, AI, data and security.

Because sometimes the right outcome isn't spending less.

It's knowing you're spending wisely 💪.

Read the blog ➡️ https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0w6mqY0

What’s changed in FinOps in 2026? Read why savings aren’t enough, how AI and data change the game, and what to do instead.

11/06/2026

Every FinOps journey hits turbulence.

Not from obvious mistakes
but from decisions that seemed right at the time.

Welcome to the Hazard Zone:
🌋 Licence Volcano
🏜️ Commitment Canyon
🌊 AI Cost Waterfall

Individually, manageable.
Together, expensive.

Good FinOps doesn’t just optimise usage.

It navigates:
→ commitments
→ scaling decisions
→ long-term cost exposure

🪐 We’ve mapped the biggest cost traps - before they hit.

👉 Get the FinOps Galaxy Field Guide: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0w43bb0