Cloud storage services offer infinite resources, such as scalability, flexibility, easy access to data and reduced costs. However, many businesses might face problems with exorbitant costs after migrating to cloud, thanks to the lack of proper governance process, mainly related to operational costs.
Having more visibility and predictability of costs, projects and products helps minimizing operational wastes of many technological resources. This way, companies have more budget to invest on what really matters and optimize time to develop other activities that generate value to the business.
What is FinOps?
Investments in performance have been considered as highly expensive by many companies. At early stages, physical servers were mandatory to activate these services and keep them running.
With cloud computing, it is simpler. Through internet, one can access technological services such as computational capabilities, storage, and database, through cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform.
FinOps is an operational model that combines culture and good practices with the purpose of controlling and optimizing cloud costs, besides increasing team’s operational capacity through resources that can be acquired with cloud services.
It is not limited only to transactions done by the company, but also combines technology and business by increasing operation’s efficiency and managing resources.
How to implement FinOps
Among principles to implement FinOps, we must highlight:
- Collaboration across all teams: FinOps must be culturally implemented and be part of the team’s day-to-day activities.
- Decisions motivated by added value of resources: the team must be aware of how services are charged and how to use these resources respecting the assigned budget.
- Everyone is responsible for cloud consumption: beyond being aware of how they work, everyone must be held accountable for their expenses through detailed reporting.
- Reports must be constantly accessible and updated: with reports, it is possible to identify which services are mostly used and their impact on budget.
- A designated team to manage FinOps: one team must be dedicated solely to implement FinOps and verify if documentation, expenses, and services are a match with what was established and agreed.
- A model of variable cloud costs: finally, teams and their leaders must follow the model defined by FinOps’ team and company managers.
Cycle of FinOps implementation
After following these adaptation steps for FinOps, it is time to apply it on internal processes. At this moment, one must pay attention to these 3 phases:
Inform
At this stage, all the costs associated with services are mapped, crossing information with performance data, and creating real-time dynamic visualization of this this data. Many cloud services are paid per hour, and this follow up is essential to start the next phase.
Optimize
With collected and organized data, it is important to elect necessary or dispensable activities and services. Besides this resources management, there must be a control of the expenses, always hunting the most accessible costs and benefits.
Operate
Finally, putting FinOps in practice. Formulated strategies are present to company’s managers, combining teams’ necessities and proposed budget. At this moment, the team responsible for FinOps operation will provide managers with solutions to optimize expenses.
Do you wish to know more about cloud services and how they can optimize your operations? Talk to one of our consultants!