Looking to cut exorbitant Cloud costs? Here’s how you can start implementing FinOps
By now, you will likely have discovered that for companies looking to be market downturn-ready, FinOps is the way to go. If you’re still figuring out what FinOps is all about and why it’s a good idea to cut your Cloud costs in the current environment – look no further than our previous blog post. However, if the question you’re asking is, “How do I get started?”, you’ve come to the right place. First, you’ll need to understand the business values that define the implementation of FinOps.
This proactive organizational culture is a true game-changer hinged on collaboration, accuracy, and efficiency.
A company with a healthy FinOps culture implements these 6 core principles
- Team collaboration: Typically, cost optimization is not a shared challenge among teams. FinOps, however, is about cultural change that breaks down these historical silos.
- Decisions are driven by the business value of Cloud: The role of FinOps is to help maximize the utilization of Cloud resources created by the spend.
- Everyone takes ownership of their Cloud usage: Everyone using the Cloud is incurring costs. FinOps pushes Cloud spend accountability across all levels of the organization.
- FinOps reports should be accessible and timely: Real-time decision-making is about getting data quickly to the people who deploy Cloud resources.
- A centralized team drives FinOps: A central FinOps function drives best practices into the organization through education, standardization, and cheerleading.
- Take advantage of the variable cost model of the Cloud: Rightsizing, scheduling, spot usage, and RI/CUD purchases are based on actual usage data, instead of possible future demands.
Whether it’s a small business with only a few staff members or a large enterprise with thousands of employees, FinOps practices can and should be implemented to maximize efficiency and reduce Cloud costs. Each, of course, will require different levels of tooling and processes. Remember that all teams have a part to play, as it is everyone’s job to help the company operate faster.
Eager to get started? Here are some actionable steps you can take in each of the 3 key phases of your FinOps journey
When approaching FinOps, CloudZone recommends beginning at the Inform stage before approaching Optimize or Operate. The reason is that it is crucial to gain visibility into what’s happening in your Cloud environment – and do the hard work of cleaning up your cost allocation to know who’s truly responsible for what – before making any changes.
Phase 1 – Inform
All activity in the FinOps lifecycle begins and ends with the Inform phase. At this crucial stage, the aim is to understand cost drivers, allocate spend, and benchmark efficiency. It may be very useful in the future for you to also map spending data to the business units and types of environment – defining budgets per account or business unit
Start by doing this: Familiarize yourself with your preferred BI tool to set you up for cost management success. It’s vital that you understand the cost and usage of your Cloud resources on a daily basis.
Phase 2 – Optimize
It’s now time to measure potential optimizations and set goals based on a defined strategy. Identifying usage and spend anomalies, finding and measuring usage optimization, and comparing services and workload placement are some ways to do this.
Start by doing this: Identify your 5 largest cost allocations, pin-point the unutilized resources of each service, and implement cost optimization best practices on the rest.
Phase 3 – Operate
Once your objectives have been formulated, you’ll need to define processes to ensure your actions achieve your goals. A key aspect of this phase is ensuring that teams take the necessary action required – it’s time for implementation.
Optimization ownership by long-term commitment should be centralized, responsibilities, as well as governance and controls, will be defined, and ultimately – you will continuously improve and automate!
Start by doing this: Define monitoring policies and set alerts for unexpected usage. Implementing recurring processes (daily, weekly or monthly) and defining the process owner who is responsible for verifying resource utilization, clearing waste, and verifying KPIs will be extremely helpful.
With FinOps you are able to drive better utilization with constant visibility into Cloud spend. The data-driven processes and real-time reporting offered results in cost-efficiency that can not only save but make the business more money. Contact CloudZone today to kickstart your FinOps journey and help you cut unnecessary Cloud Costs and achieve overall efficiency.
