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14 June 2023

A Complete Guide on Using FinOps To Achieve Financial Excellence

In today's digital landscape, businesses are increasingly relying on cloud computing to power their operations. While the cloud offers scalability, flexibility, and cost savings, it also introduces new challenges in managing cloud spend and optimising resource usage. This is where FinOps comes into play. FinOps (short for Financial Operations) is a set of practices and principles that help organisations manage and optimise their cloud costs effectively.

In this blog, we will delve into the world of FinOps, covering quick wins, steps for adoption, short and long term benefits, as well as risks and cons associated with it.

What is FinOps?

FinOps is the practice of bringing together cross-functional teams, including finance, operations, and engineering, to manage and optimise cloud costs throughout the entire lifecycle of cloud services. It combines financial management principles with operational practices to ensure cost visibility, accountability, and optimisation in the cloud environment.

Key Objectives:

Increase cost visibility and transparency: One of the primary goals of FinOps is to provide organisations with a clear understanding of their cloud costs. This involves establishing processes and tools to track and analyse spending at different levels, such as workload, project, team, or department. By gaining visibility into cost patterns and trends, organisations can identify areas of overspending, inefficiencies, or optimisation opportunities.
Optimise cloud spending without sacrificing performance: FinOps aims to strike a balance between cost optimisation and maintaining optimal performance and user experience. It involves continuously monitoring resource utilisation, analysing performance metrics, and making data-driven decisions to optimise resource allocation. By identifying and eliminating wasteful spending, rightsizing resources, and leveraging cloud provider offerings, organisations can reduce costs while ensuring the desired level of performance.
Enable accountability and governance in cloud resource usage: FinOps promotes a culture of accountability by establishing clear ownership and responsibility for cloud spending. It involves defining cost allocation frameworks, tagging strategies, and implementing mechanisms for chargeback or showback. By allocating costs accurately to the teams or projects that consume cloud resources, organisations can drive accountability and encourage cost-conscious behaviour.
Foster collaboration between teams to align cloud costs with business objectives: FinOps emphasises the collaboration and alignment of finance, operations, and engineering teams. By breaking down silos and facilitating cross-functional communication, organisations can ensure that cloud spending aligns with business objectives. Finance teams provide budgeting and forecasting insights, operations teams optimise resource usage, and engineering teams leverage their technical expertise to achieve cost-effective solutions. This collaboration helps drive financial excellence and ensures that cloud investments support overall business goals.

Adopting FinOps

Create a FinOps Team:

Bring stakeholders together: Form a cross-functional team consisting of representatives from finance, operations, and engineering departments. This team will be responsible for driving the adoption of FinOps practices and ensuring collaboration among different functions.
Assign roles and responsibilities: Define roles and responsibilities within the FinOps team. Designate individuals responsible for overseeing cost optimisation, budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and implementing FinOps practices. This ensures clear ownership and accountability for different aspects of cloud cost management.

Establish a Cloud Financial Management Practice:

Set clear goals and metrics to track cloud cost optimisation: Define specific goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your FinOps initiatives. Examples include reducing overall cloud spend by a certain percentage, improving resource utilisation rates, or achieving cost savings in specific areas.
Define policies and processes for budgeting, forecasting, and reporting: This involves setting up regular budget reviews, forecasting future cloud spending, and creating reports that provide visibility into cost trends and insights for decision-making.
Implement tools and platforms for cost analysis and optimisation: Leverage cloud management platforms, cost optimisation tools, and analytics solutions to gain visibility into cloud costs, monitor resource utilisation, and identify optimisation opportunities. These tools provide insights and automation capabilities that streamline the FinOps process.

Promote Collaboration and Accountability:

Encourage cross-functional communication and collaboration: Promote a culture of collaboration and knowledge-sharing among finance, operations, and engineering teams. Encourage regular meetings, discussions, and workshops to align cloud cost management efforts and foster a shared understanding of FinOps principles and practices.
Implement shared cost ownership and chargeback/showback mechanisms: Introduce mechanisms for shared cost ownership, where different teams or departments have visibility and accountability for their cloud costs. Implement chargeback or showback processes to attribute costs to different teams based on resource usage. This promotes cost-conscious behaviour and encourages teams to optimise their resource consumption.
Establish cost-awareness training programs for employees: Organise training programs to educate employees about FinOps, cloud cost management best practices, and the impact of their actions on cloud spending. This helps spread a cost-aware culture across the organisation and empowers employees to make informed decisions regarding cloud resource utilisation.

Continuous Improvement:

Regularly review and optimise cloud resource usage: Perform regular reviews of cloud resource utilisation, cost trends, and performance metrics. Identify areas where optimisation is possible, such as rightsizing instances, eliminating idle resources, or exploring more cost-effective alternatives. Continuously iterate and improve upon your FinOps practices to drive ongoing cost optimisation.
Leverage data-driven insights and analytics for cost optimisation: Utilise data analytics and visualisation tools to gain insights into cloud cost patterns, usage trends, and performance metrics. Leverage these insights to make informed decisions and prioritise optimisation efforts. Identify anomalies, cost spikes, or areas of inefficiency and take appropriate actions to optimise cloud spending.
Stay informed about updates to cloud provider pricing models, discounts, and new offerings: Regularly review pricing documentation, attend webinars, and engage with cloud provider representatives to ensure you are taking advantage of cost-saving opportunities and optimising your cloud spend accordingly.

Quick Wins

Establish a Cloud Cost Management Framework:

Define cost allocation and tagging strategies: Implementing a well-defined cost allocation strategy allows organisations to accurately attribute cloud costs to specific teams, projects, or departments. Utilising effective tagging strategies ensures consistent and reliable cost tracking and reporting.
Implement resource-level monitoring and alerting: By setting up monitoring tools and alerts, organisations can proactively identify resource usage patterns, detect anomalies, and receive notifications when costs exceed predefined thresholds. This enables timely intervention and cost optimisation.
Identify and eliminate idle or underutilised resources: Regularly analyse resource utilisation data to identify cloud resources that are no longer actively used (orphaned resources, for instance) or are underutilised. By terminating or rightsizing such resources, organisations can quickly achieve significant cost savings.
Tackle top cloud resource spenders: Identifying the top five cloud resources that consume the majority of your cloud budget and actioning on possible optimisation opportunities (right-sizing, decommissioning, snoozing, consolidation, etc.) allow organisations to effectively reduce their largest cost drivers, leading to substantial and immediate cost savings.

Right-Sizing:

Analyse resource utilisation to identify over-provisioned instances: Evaluate the performance and utilisation metrics of cloud resources to identify instances that are over-provisioned or have excessive capacity. Rightsizing these resources to match actual workload requirements can lead to immediate cost reductions.
Resize instances to match workload requirements: Using data-driven insights, organisations can determine the appropriate resource configurations for their workloads. This involves selecting the right instance type, adjusting central processing unit (CPU), memory, and storage resources to align with actual usage patterns, and utilising auto-scaling to dynamically adjust resources based on demand.
Utilise auto-scaling to adjust resources based on demand: Implementing auto-scaling capabilities allows organisations to automatically adjust the number of instances or resources based on workload demands. This ensures optimal resource utilisation during peak and off-peak periods, reducing costs associated with idle resources.

Reserved Instances:

Purchase reserved instances: Reserved instances provide significant cost savings compared to on-demand pricing. By committing to a specific instance type or a certain amount of usage, organisations can lock in discounted rates for long-term usage, resulting in substantial cost savings.
Identify workloads with consistent usage patterns: Analyse historical usage data to identify workloads that exhibit stable and predictable usage patterns over time. These workloads are good candidates for reserved instances.
Leverage utilisation and coverage reports provided by cloud providers to identify opportunities for further optimisation: These reports offer insights into the utilisation of reserved instances and help organisations make informed decisions on adjustments or additional purchases.

Snoozing:

Identify Snooze Candidates: Identifying the cloud resources or services that are suitable for temporary suspension. These can include development or testing environments, non-production instances, or services used during specific hours or periods. Analysing usage patterns and demand fluctuations can help identify resources that experience low or no activity for significant periods.
Implement Automation and Orchestration: Organisations can leverage cloud management platforms or scripting capabilities to automate the scheduling of snooze periods. This ensures that resources are automatically paused and resumed according to predefined schedules or triggers.
Establish Snooze Policies: These policies should outline the criteria for identifying snooze candidates, define the duration and frequency of snooze periods, and specify the approval process for overriding snooze schedules when necessary.

The State of DevOps in Financial Services

We reached out to IT professionals in financial services to gain a greater understanding of innovation and DevOps in their organization.

We received responses from 165 professionals, ranging from engineers to CTOs working at a range of financial services organizations from FinTech startups and investment funds to insurance firms and the biggest global banks.

Check out this White Paper to find out everything you need to know about the world of DevOps in financial services.

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The Benefits of FinOps

Short-Term Benefits:

Cost Reduction: Implementing FinOps practices leads to immediate cost reductions. By analysing resource utilisation, identifying and eliminating idle or underutilised resources, right-sizing instances, and leveraging cost optimisation techniques, organisations can significantly reduce their cloud spending in the short term.
Cost Allocation: FinOps enables accurate cost allocation to different teams, projects, or departments. This visibility allows organisations to track and attribute cloud costs to the responsible entities. It promotes transparency and accountability, ensuring that teams have visibility into their cloud spending and can take ownership of their resource usage.
Cost Control: FinOps provides organisations with better control over their cloud spending. By establishing budget limits, implementing monitoring and alerting mechanisms, and enforcing cost policies and governance, organisations can prevent cost overruns and maintain tighter control over their cloud expenditure.

Long-Term Benefits:

Financial Accountability: FinOps fosters a culture of financial accountability within organisations. By involving stakeholders from finance, operations, and engineering in cloud cost management, it establishes a sense of ownership and responsibility for cloud spending. Teams become more conscious of the financial impact of their actions and are motivated to optimise resource usage.
Optimisation Culture: FinOps establishes an optimisation culture within organisations, encouraging continuous improvement in cloud cost management. By regularly reviewing resource utilisation, leveraging data-driven insights, and implementing optimisation strategies, organisations cultivate a mindset of seeking efficiency and cost-effectiveness in their cloud operations.
Strategic Decision-Making: With FinOps practices in place, organisations can make data-driven decisions regarding workload placement, cloud provider selection, and pricing models. They have access to accurate cost and utilisation data, enabling them to assess the financial implications of different choices and align their cloud strategies with business goals. This leads to more informed and strategic decision-making in the long term.
Scalability and Agility: By optimising cloud costs, organisations can allocate resources more efficiently and scale their infrastructure as needed. FinOps allows businesses to adapt their cloud usage based on demand, enabling agility and scalability without incurring unnecessary expenses. This flexibility supports rapid growth and changing business requirements.
Innovation and Investment: Optimising cloud costs through FinOps practices frees up budget for innovation and investment in other areas of the business. By reducing unnecessary spending and maximising the value derived from cloud resources, organisations can allocate resources to initiatives that drive innovation, product development, or strategic investments, fostering business growth.

Challenges around FinOps adoption

Complexity of Implementation: Implementing FinOps practices can be complex and challenging, especially for organisations that are new to cloud cost management. It requires coordination and collaboration between finance, operations, and engineering teams, and the integration of various tools and processes. The learning curve and initial setup can be time-consuming and resource-intensive.
Cultural Resistance: Adopting FinOps requires a cultural shift within the organisation. Some stakeholders may resist changes to established practices and workflows. Finance teams may need to adjust their traditional financial management approaches to align with the dynamic nature of cloud environments. Overcoming resistance and ensuring buy-in from all relevant parties can be a significant challenge.
Skills and Expertise Gap: Effective implementation of FinOps practices requires individuals with a deep understanding of cloud services, cost management principles, and technical skills. It may be challenging to find personnel with the necessary expertise, and organisations may need to invest in training or hire external resources to fill the skills gap.
Tooling and Integration: Implementing FinOps practices often involves integrating various tools and platforms for cost analysis, monitoring, and optimisation. Integrating these tools with existing systems and workflows can be complex. Additionally, managing multiple tools and ensuring data accuracy and consistency across platforms can pose challenges.
Changing Cloud Provider Pricing: Cloud providers frequently update their pricing models and introduce new offerings. This can make it challenging to stay up-to-date with changes and effectively optimise costs. Organisations need to continuously monitor cloud provider updates, adjust their cost management strategies, and assess the impact of pricing changes on their overall cloud spending.
Lack of Cost Visibility: In some cases, organisations may struggle with limited visibility into their cloud costs due to complex billing structures, lack of tagging standards, or inadequate tooling. Insufficient visibility makes it difficult to identify areas of overspending or inefficiencies, hindering effective cost optimisation efforts.
Balancing Cost Optimisation and Performance: While cost optimisation is a key objective of FinOps, organisations must also consider the impact on performance and user experience. Over-optimisation, such as rightsizing resources too aggressively, can lead to performance degradation or service disruptions. Striking the right balance between cost savings and maintaining optimal performance is a challenge that organisations need to carefully manage.
Compliance and Security Risks: Implementing FinOps practices requires organisations to consider compliance and security implications. Managing cloud costs may involve accessing and analysing sensitive financial and usage data. Organisations need to ensure proper security controls, data protection measures, and compliance with regulatory requirements when handling such information.

Despite these risks and challenges, organisations can mitigate them through careful planning, training, and ongoing refinement of their FinOps practices. By addressing these potential pitfalls proactively, organisations can successfully navigate the path to effective cloud cost management and reap the long-term benefits of FinOps.

Summary:

FinOps, the practice of combining financial management principles with operational practices to manage and optimise cloud costs, offers significant benefits to organisations. By understanding and adopting FinOps practices, organisations can achieve short-term cost reductions, establish financial accountability, drive optimisation culture, make strategic decisions, and foster innovation.

However, the adoption of FinOps comes with its own set of challenges. Implementing FinOps requires overcoming complexity, cultural resistance, and bridging skills and expertise gaps. Organisations must also navigate changing cloud provider pricing, address visibility limitations, balance cost optimisation with performance, and manage compliance and security risks.

Ultimately, the long-term benefits of FinOps outweigh the challenges. Organisations gain control over cloud spending, align costs with business objectives, optimise resource utilisation, and allocate resources to areas of innovation and investment. By embedding FinOps practices into their operations, organisations can maximise the value derived from cloud services and drive financial excellence in the ever-evolving cloud landscape.