FinOps: One-stop Cloud Financial Management for Better Operations and Profitable Growth

The cloud is the tour de force of digital innovation and rapid growth. The good news is that 70% of organizations worldwide have migrated and adopted cloud-native tools and services. The bad news is that while doing so, the companies spend ridiculous and massive amounts of money on cloud environments without a proper governance framework. So, when the research says that 30% of Cloud spend is getting wasted or severely underutilized, it should not throw you off guard but motivate you to find a solution to optimize your cloud investments wisely.

Why FinOps: The Cloud Cost Dilemma  

However, before delving into this, let’s analyze the root cause/s of this impending problem. Understanding cloud governance is complex by nature, especially cost management. Fundamentally, IT teams grapple with these two key aspects of the cloud governance model: 

But it’s not just the IT teams that are stuck in this dilemma. The top-level management faces challenges in understanding cost management and evaluating investments as below:  

Defining FinOps  

FinOps is a one-stop discipline to address these concerns. At its core, FinOps is about integrating people, process and technology to facilitate financial accountability in pay-as-you-go cloud environments. For more clarity, here’s how the FinOps Foundation has defined FinOps:  

“FinOps is an evolving cloud financial management discipline and cultural practice that enables organizations to get maximum business value by helping engineering, finance, technology and business teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions.” 

Here’s what you need to understand. The goal of FinOps is not just to save money. It is much more than just cost optimization. FinOps helps you to streamline your spending, so that each dollar invested can yield maximum business value. For instance, if spending additionally on a cloud service can enhance marginal value, then FinOps will help to justify this investment. FinOps helps the enterprise in minimizing wasted spending and guides the team to invest in services that can allow the organization to rapidly scale, adapt and innovate.   

 The Challenges to Keep in Mind  

However, implementing FinOps is easier said than done. Here are some roadblocks that compel organizations to halt their FinOps journey for good:  

• Due to the complexities of cloud ecosystems and its inter-connectedness with multiple business factions, FinOps implementation is a cumbersome exercise that demands specialized expertise and knowledge. 
•  A Lack of understanding and implementation of augmented FinOps. The latter, if properly leveraged, can offer intelligent insights and tailored recommendations to optimize your customer’s Cloud spend 
• FinOps is more a “a big data challenge” given the huge volumes of financial data that are produced across cloud environments and the difficulty in churning them to effective insights.  

Master Cloud Economics with Cloud4C FinOps-as-a-Service  

With Cloud4C’s FinOps-as-a-service, we help you improve and streamline cloud budgets with the right governance of cloud resource utilization and maintain the quality of services for better end experiences. Our AI/ML-driven FinOps processes assist you in mastering cloud economics through IT asset management, cost optimization, budget management, right sizing and policy and governance. Make no mistake. FinOps is not just the sole responsibility of the finance teams. Nor can only one software help you realize the goals of cost management. At the heart of it, FinOps is about collaborating with different teams like leadership, finance, operations, and development via a common discipline and intelligent digital framework to break down the silos and work towards the effective management of the Cloud platforms.