Successful FinOps: Focusing on People, Processes and Tools
Simply put, FinOps is a fast-paced and modern financial discipline that brings visibility and accountability to public cloud spending. Adopting FinOps enables organizations to attain maximum business value (e.g., agility, performance, scalability) from the cloud. Building and realizing a FinOps program, however, isn’t just about saving money. FinOps is about making money by knowing where to spend your money most effectively to maximize business value. Many organizations know there’s value to FinOps and that the cloud is the place to be. Nevertheless, capturing the full value of the cloud through FinOps extends beyond cloud workloads and into the people, processes and tools involved. Let’s take a deeper look at what happens when you experience a successful FinOps journey.
Starting the journey with a team-based framework
Getting a cross-functional team united and focused on the same mission is the foundation of addressing cloud costs and achieving a more future-ready FinOps framework. This framework prevents siloed teams (e.g., Finance) from identifying cost savings and cutting off services without context as to what is mission critical. FinOps provides for cross-functional collaboration from engineering, operational, finance and executive teams. Actions and decisions made by any one of these organizational teams influences the others.
FinOps teams come together to:
- Define cloud use strategy
- Adjust cloud budgets
- Set cloud usage practices
- Review results and analyze value
- Make ongoing adjustments
This organizational collaboration allows teams to learn from each other and to build on collective knowledge. Pulling together technology, operations and finance teams also encourages everyone to take a fresh look at their tasks from the point of view of their collaborators. The FinOps team collaboration ultimately results in enhanced creativity, innovation and efficiency.
Establishing hands-on FinOps processes
FinOps shines a light onto cloud resources and allows distributed engineering and business teams to make trade-offs between speed, cost and quality in their cloud architecture and investment decisions. These processes help drive financial accountability and accelerate business value realization by enabling frictionless cloud governance and controls. They align cloud activities to the organization’s overall goals and strategies to deploy and manage resources more efficiently. Meanwhile, the policies ensure cloud costs are predictable and manageable. All told, FinOps supports the consistent adoption of best practices across the organization.
Tools to realize cross-functional FinOps benefits
Cloud financial optimization tools help organizations optimize cloud usage and costs. These tools may be native to specific cloud providers, or third-party vendors may offer them. Some organizations have also developed in-house cloud cost optimization and cloud management tools. FinOps teams rely on software solutions to track cloud usage with users and projects, interpret lengthy invoices, generate reports and make cloud usage and optimization decisions. Traditional cloud financial management tools are usually tailored to reporting on the cloud resources an organization is using and how much those resources cost. FinOps tools serve a similar purpose, but the analysis and reporting are tailored to provide FinOps teams with actionable cloud financial management recommendations and optimizations.
FinOps tool features and functionalities can include the following:
- Budget allocation tags
- Detailed views of cloud use
- Cost reporting
- Budgeting and projection resources
That’s just the half of it. All this functionality shows how these tools enable team members to improve performance and spend.
Let us help you experience a successful FinOps journey
Your quest for an effective FinOps program will take your finance, engineering, operations and executive teams on quite the ride. FinOps is a continuous journey towards ensuring maximum value from the cloud for minimum spend. You don’t always know where you’re going, but you know you’re not going back to the old days of cloud financial and accountability challenges.
We can help guide and enable your FinOps team with our latest solutions. Contact us now to get started.