The cloud brings huge benefits. But ask any cloud user and they’ll also tell you that cloud costs can get completely out of control if you’re not very careful. And so the term that is trending now is FinOps, an acronym for financial operations. It is the practice of tracking finances. Aspects of cloud transformations that ensure you don’t use more servers, storage, networks and cloud solutions than absolutely necessary.
It involves the product owner and finance and engineering departments who analyze the data and then use it to negotiate rates and infrastructure changes with cloud providers. Finops is a cloud economy where a consumption architect tells companies how to lower the bill by making changes to the architecture.
Finops is also about creating professionals – not just one group of professionals – working to optimize cloud costs. If Devops is the culture of development, Finops is the culture of personal finance. Creates utilization. A community of people who can watch the money spent.
What customers want
A fifth of customers question where cloud spending goes. How many services they use, clients want to know what workload is working on which cloud platform and what the phenomenon is only in the last year. IBM delivers its billing data on an open-source billing platform, so anyone can access what’s happening in its clouds.
Finops led teams to ask questions such as how many licenses are needed for the transformation process, how much carbon footprint is generated beyond the actual cost of running the cloud. Ever since Finops became a concept, engineers, finance and business leaders have started collaborating and working with data to reduce cloud spending.
“Someone has to pay the costs of these business units. Finops makes it possible for them. This model allows companies to allocate costs based on consumption within their respective units.
Continuous process
Finops, not a one-time solution. With Finops, we have moved from constantly important, continuous development to continuous improvement and continuous optimization. For Finops, based on a ten-year multi-cloud transformation program, it usually varies from project to project.
