Reining in cloud spending with CloudFinOps

On the surface, it seems inevitable that enterprises all over the world will migrate to the cloud in due time, but in some cases, there are structural problems holding them back. Chief among them are budgetary concerns.

Cloud cost overruns are a result of the obsolete operating models of many modern enterprises. A few years ago, it made more sense for enterprises to operate on CapEx-heavy models, but the cloud is upending that paradigm. So today, let’s take an in-depth look at CloudFinOps – a new way to look at cloud management.

CloudFinOps is a collaborative operating philosophy that requires participation from IT, finance, and DevOps teams to work together to keep costs low. CloudFinOps is less of a method and more of a culture that requires buy-in from all stakeholders within the organization for it to be effective. By creating cross-functional teams that can work independently and make disciplined financial decisions, the whole organization benefits by keeping cloud expenditure from exceeding intended targets.

The financial challenge of cloud adoption

The greatest hurdle to cloud adoption is its variable cost structures. If not scrutinized properly, your IT budget could spiral out of control during the cloud migration process.

If organizations scramble to adopt a cloud strategy without proper planning, it is highly likely to result in a scenario where there is overprovisioning for a set of processes at the expense of other workloads. Both are antithetical to the notion of keeping cloud costs under control and impact the bottom line negatively.

These challenges are mostly a result of attempting to apply old technological principles to a new IT environment. Cloud computing today is less of a discrete “start-stop” technology and more of a “flywheel” that gains speed as the organization matures. Under such circumstances, it is best to implement CloudFinOps using a three-phase model:

• Inform: Communicate the objective of each function before provisioning it.
• Optimize: Relentlessly optimize your IT environment for cloud usage.
• Operate: Continue your operations with sufficient oversight to ensure lean usage.

How you can benefit from CloudFinOps

CloudFinOps operates with a singular goal: to maximize return on investment on cloud expenditure. It does this by pruning unnecessary expenses and instilling practices that heavily discourage waste while making it easier for teams to reduce inefficiency at a granular level. This not only makes teams agile, but also translates to greater operational agility across the whole organization.

CloudFinOps brings value to the modern enterprise in a variety of ways:

• Accelerating business value realization and innovation: By making teams more agile, CloudFinOps unclogs bottlenecks throughout the enterprise.
• Driving financial accountability and visibility: CloudFinOps’ computational prowess and its centralized approach offer a new level of transparency.
• Optimizing cloud use and cutting costs: By aligning stakeholders across the enterprise, CloudFinOps does away with redundancies in cloud use.
• Enabling cross-organizational trust and collaboration: CloudFinOps enables new frontiers of collaboration across the enterprise.
• Preventing sprawl of cloud spending: An effective CloudFinOps practice accounts for cloud complexity and keeps it at manageable levels.

How you can implement CloudFinOps

Bringing CloudFinOps to an organization requires leadership to have a good understanding of the principles that FinOps follows. These are:

• Cross-functional collaboration: Greater collaboration among your IT, finance, cloud ops, and DevOps teams                
• Value-driven decision making: Decision making that is data-driven as much as it is intuitive
• Accountability for cloud usage: Clearly defined areas of ownership with respect to cloud resources
• Accessibility and timeliness: Including around-the-clock availability and on-demand capabilities
• Centralized operations: With an integrated console to view overall cloud activities
• Constant acknowledgment of variable pricing: Perpetual realization of the variable price model to ensure teams keep their cloud usage in check

As companies increasingly migrate to the cloud, they are recognizing the need for CloudFinOps. With Cloud FinOps, organizations can capture greater efficiency and productivity while also gaining full visibility into cost management, ultimately enabling businesses to align IT goals with broader objectives.

By deploying Cloud FinOps, companies not only do companies attain increased agility and scalability, but they also gain access to cost-effective solutions that amplify the value of their investments in the cloud. In short: Adopting Cloud FinOps is a smart way for organizations to maximize the advantages offered by today's advanced computing technologies.

And at Zones, we can help. To find out how a new approach to cloud spending can transform your business, connect with a Zones Account Manager today.

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