In a cloud-first world, the data center often gets left behind but...... it still represents a significant part of many organizations’ IT budgets. With the FinOps Foundation expanding its focus beyond cloud, it’s clear that the principles of collaboration, accountability, and cost optimization must also apply to on-premises and hybrid environments.
At YäRKEN, we believe your data center deserves the same level of clarity and agility as your cloud spend. That’s why we built our platform to extend FinOps best practices across every platform —> from mainframes to x86 servers to hybrid data centers.
Here’s how YäRKEN helps you modernize your data center financial management:
Data center costs are notoriously opaque. Power, cooling, hardware leases, facilities, software licensing, and labor often end up buried in general ledgers or spread across disconnected systems.
YäRKEN unifies these costs into a standardized model by:
Ingesting data from facilities, equipment, maintenance contracts, labor timesheets, and more.
Aligning spend to the TBM taxonomy to create a common financial language across IT, Finance, and business stakeholders.
Distributing data center costs to the specific platforms they support (mainframe, x86, Unix), enabling clear attribution of expenses by platform
Traditional cost models often spread data center expenses evenly or rely on outdated assumptions. YäRKEN’s advanced allocation engine allows you to:
Create flexible, consumption-based or percentage-based allocation rules for each platform.
Assign costs directly to applications, services, or business units using metrics like CPU usage, MSUs, storage TBs, or power consumption.
Ensure allocations are repeatable and automated, minimizing manual intervention and human error.
Moving beyond simple infrastructure costs, YäRKEN brings total cost of ownership (TCO) clarity by supplementing direct expenses with hidden costs, including:
Shared services like security, compliance, and management tools.
Labor costs from teams supporting your platforms.
Supporting software and licenses essential to keeping your environment running smoothlywebsite content.
This comprehensive TCO model allows you to compare data center platforms to cloud options using normalized and cloud-agnostic metrics, so you can make informed decisions about modernization, migrations, or continued investment.
Just like with cloud, FinOps for data centers is about continuous improvement, not just reporting. YäRKEN helps you:
Analyze unit economics (e.g., cost per MSU, cost per workload) to identify efficiency opportunities.
Monitor trends and anomalies with automated alerts for cost spikes or irregular usage.
Facilitate showback or chargeback, empowering business units to see and take ownership of their share of data center costs.
Modern IT isn’t about cutting costs blindly; it’s about ensuring investments drive outcomes. YäRKEN enables you to:
Link spend with outcomes by tracking usage and value delivery across business services.
Build business cases comparing the cost of maintaining legacy platforms vs. migrating workloads to cloud or alternative architectures.
Communicate IT’s contribution in a language stakeholders understand by combining technical, financial, and business data in one platform.
With YäRKEN, you don’t need to rely on disconnected spreadsheets or static reports. Our platform brings FinOps discipline to your entire IT estate, including the data center, so you can plan proactively, allocate accurately, and continuously optimize your hybrid environment.
Ready to connect the dots between your technology and your business outcomes? Let’s start building a data center cost model you can trust.