What is FinOps?
FinOps definition
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.
FinOps examples
⇨ Cost Optimization
FinOps teams can use cloud cost optimization practices to reduce cloud costs while maintaining or improving performance. Techniques such as identifying unused or underutilized resources, right-sizing instances, and implementing automation can be used to achieve cost savings without sacrificing performance. Additionally, FinOps teams can develop strategies for allocating cloud costs in order to optimize spending.
⇨ Budget Management
FinOps teams can establish and manage budgets for cloud services and applications. This involves tracking spending against budget goals, setting alerts and notifications when spending approaches or exceeds budget limits, and implementing cost-saving measures when necessary. Additionally, establishing policies and procedures around budget management can help organizations stay within budget and prevent unnecessary spending.
⇨ Cost Allocation and Chargebacks
FinOps teams can allocate cloud costs to different business units, teams, or projects, and implement chargeback policies in order to ensure accountability for usage costs. This helps internal stakeholders understand their cloud usage and associated costs, which allows them to make informed decisions about how and where to deploy cloud resources.
⇨ Financial Governance
FinOps teams can implement financial governance policies and procedures to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, manage risk, and maintain financial control over cloud spending. Additionally, FinOps teams can establish practices for auditing and monitoring cloud usage in order to identify potential issues or areas of cost optimization.
⇨ Reporting and Analytics
FinOps teams can use cloud financial data to generate reports and analytics that help stakeholders understand cloud spending, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions. Additionally, FinOps teams can provide insights into cost optimization opportunities by recommending changes or improvements to existing cloud strategies.
How Ceeview empowers FinOps teams
Ceeview’s cost & budget management platform and expert professional services team can empower FinOps teams in several ways:
⇨ Customizable cost & budget management dashboards
With Ceeview customizable cost & budget management dashboards (example shown below), FinOps teams can gain real-time visibility into cloud spending and budget status. This can help teams identify cost-saving opportunities, monitor spending trends, and track budget usage against goals. Key insights with warning notices can alert teams to potential budget overruns, enabling corrective action before it is too late.
⇨ Deep data analysis
Ceeview’s cost control platform and services team performs deep data analysis of an organization’s commercial and technical environment, including key performance indicators (KPIs). This can help FinOps teams better understand cloud spending patterns, identify areas of overspending or inefficiency, and make data-driven decisions to optimize cloud costs.
⇨ Assessment reports and recommendations
Ceeview’s services engagement generates summary reports (example shown below) that draw attention to current and forecasted state of cost & budget along with optimization scoring against key KPIs, the report includes recommendations for a more optimized cloud environment. This can help FinOps teams prioritize efforts and take targeted actions to reduce costs and optimize cloud spending.
⇨ Hands-on support
Ceeview uniquely provides high-touch support to implement recommendations when our customers are incapable. This can be particularly valuable for small or resource-constrained organizations that may lack the expertise or bandwidth to make the necessary changes on their own.
By providing these collective capabilities, Ceeview can help FinOps teams improve overall financial operations by reducing cloud costs, optimizing spending, and increasing budget predictability. This can your organization operate more efficiently to achieve financial goals.
FAQ
Why is FinOps important?
FinOps is important because cloud spending can easily spiral out of control, resulting in unexpected costs, budget overruns, and financial waste. FinOps practices help organizations manage cloud spending effectively, reduce costs, and maintain financial control over cloud spending.
Who is responsible for FinOps?
FinOps is a cross-functional practice that involves finance, operations, and technology teams working together to manage cloud spending effectively. While organizations may structure their FinOps teams differently, in general, the team is responsible for optimizing cloud costs, managing budgets, implementing financial governance, and reporting and analytics.
How can I get started with FinOps?
To get started with FinOps, organizations should assess their current cloud spending practices, identify areas for improvement, and implement a set of FinOps practices that align with their business goals. This may involve setting up a FinOps team, establishing financial governance policies, implementing cost-saving measures, and leveraging cloud cost optimization tools and practices.
What are some best practices for FinOps?
FinOps include establishing clear financial governance policies, implementing cost optimization measures, tracking cloud spending against budgets, allocating costs to business units or teams, implementing chargebacks, and using cloud cost optimization tools and practices. Additionally, regular reporting and analytics can help organizations identify trends and make data-driven decisions about their cloud spending.
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