What is FinOps?
FinOps stands for Financial Operations, and it refers to the practice of bringing together finance, operations, and technology teams to optimize the costs of cloud computing within an organization.
FinOps aims to improve an organization's understanding of cloud spending, enable efficient allocation of resources, and ensure that the cloud infrastructure aligns with business goals.
Key aspects of FinOps include:
- Visibility and transparency: FinOps emphasizes the importance of providing clear visibility into cloud costs. This involves tracking and understanding where cloud expenses are incurred and allocating costs to specific teams or projects.
- Cost allocation: FinOps helps organizations allocate cloud costs accurately to different departments, teams, or projects. This enables better financial accountability and facilitates informed decision-making.
- Optimization: The practice focuses on optimizing cloud spending by identifying underutilized resources, implementing cost-saving strategies, and ensuring that resources are appropriately sized for their workload.
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Collaboration: FinOps encourages collaboration between finance, operations, and technology teams. This collaborative approach ensures that financial considerations are integrated into the decision-making processes related to cloud usage.
- Automation: Automation is a key component of FinOps. By automating certain processes, organizations can more efficiently manage and optimize their cloud infrastructure, reducing manual efforts and potential errors.
- Continuous improvement: FinOps is an ongoing, iterative process. It involves regularly reviewing cloud costs, identifying areas for improvement, and implementing changes to optimize spending over time.
- Benchmarking: FinOps may involve benchmarking an organization's cloud spending against industry standards or peers. This helps organizations understand how their cloud costs compare and identify areas for improvement.
Overall, FinOps is a framework that aligns financial accountability with the flexibility and scalability of cloud computing. It is particularly relevant in the context of public cloud services, where organizations pay for the resources they consume on a pay-as-you-go basis. The goal is to strike a balance between innovation, speed, and cost efficiency in the cloud.
Cegal and FinOps
Cegal helps customers to implement Financial Management (FinOps) and we have FinOps Certified people who help in the following ways to achieve the best out of their spending:
- Cegal supports organizations in establishing a continuous improvement cycle for FinOps. This involves regularly reviewing and adjusting financial practices based on changing business needs and technology landscapes.
- We help customers to access customized reports and dashboards to analyze and track FinOps metrics. This helps organizations make informed decisions about resource allocation and cost optimization strategies.
- We help in allocating cloud costs accurately across different business units, projects, or departments. This allows organizations to charge back costs, fostering accountability and transparency.
- Regularly assess the offerings and pricing models of different cloud service providers. Consider multi-cloud or hybrid cloud strategies to leverage the best value for specific workloads.
- Assists in creating and managing budgets for cloud resources. It enables organizations to forecast future costs based on historical usage patterns, allowing for better financial planning.
We help customers to better predict strategic planning cycles in terms of predicted spending. It enables a more proactive approach to look at future migrations and our overall technology estate and where customers should potentially be targeting certain transitions.