FAQ: What Is Cloud FinOps?

FAQ: Cloud FinOps

In today's uncertain environment, with talks of recession and tough times ahead, companies are proactively transitioning from revenue-driven programs to cost-cutting measures. This is especially true when it comes to tech and cloud services.

Making this transition can be a daunting task. Where should companies start cutting costs? The answer varies based on individual circumstances, but the solution might lie in the world of Cloud FinOps (Cloud Financial Operations).

Is your company considering cost-cutting measures? After reading this post you’ll be able to answer the following questions regarding Cloud FinOps:

• What Is Cloud FinOps?
• Why Is Cloud FinOps Relevant?
• How Does It Relate To Your Modern Data Stack?
• How Does One Go About Implementing Cloud FinOps Best Practices?

What Is Cloud FinOps?

Cloud FinOps, short for Cloud Financial Operations, is a relatively new business framework that provides a set of principles, practices, and tools to help organizations manage and optimize their cloud spending. It combines financial management, cloud engineering, and business analytics to help companies better understand, control, and reduce their cloud costs. Cloud FinOps teams work collaboratively across departments to monitor and optimize cloud usage, manage budgets, and improve overall cost efficiency.

Why Is Cloud FinOps Relevant?

Cloud services account for a significant portion of a company's overall IT budget. Fast paced environments, lax governance (overspending on cloud without proper oversight resulting in large bills), usage fluctuations (e.g. pay-as-you-go models), and the fact that many businesses use multiple cloud providers and services have made tracking, monitoring and optimizing essential to avoiding overspending and waste.

Cloud FinOps best practices have become a standard from streamlining cloud operations, not just because of the resources that can be saved, but because of the resources that can be generated additionally due to improved functionality and increased collaboration and transparency between departments.

Here are some industry statistics on the topic:

• A report by Gartner shows that by implementing Cloud FinOps best practices, businesses can identify and eliminate wasteful cloud spending, saving up to 25% on their cloud computing budget.
• A survey conducted by Flexera discovered that up to 35% of cloud spending can go to waste due to unused or inefficiently used cloud resources.
• A McKinsey Published Article claims leaders can cut as much as 25% of the cloud program costs while preserving their value-generating capabilities.

How Does One Go About Implementing Cloud FinOps Best Practices?

So, how does a business looking to boost its business by implementing Cloud FinOps best practices, go about cost-cutting? Where does one start? What should teams be looking out for specifically?

We can summarize the Cloud FinOps process in three general categories. These categories can be occurring simultaneously within an organization as Cloud FinOps can become a continuous process.

Discovery

As with many issues, the first step is understanding the problem. A team of cloud experts takes the time to understand how an organization is going about spending across services, noting and studying any and all inefficient cost structures, invisible expenses, and bad practices. Understanding spend allocation is not only about looking back but at setting clear parameters looking forwarded when forecasting cloud resources and services.

Optimization

The next step is optimizing the discovered inefficiencies through the management of data storage, processing, compute, retrieval, and transformation costs. This includes adapting current processes and resources but also leaning into automation to reduce unnecessary spending.

• For example, in GCP, the use of BigQuery could be cost-effectively optimized by simply tuning the queries to bring in just the required information.
• In AWS, it could be applied with a simple cost-saving strategy by just defining a lifecycle for the objects in S3.

Operationalization

The last step in the cycle involves operationalizing cost monitoring and management, essentially making sure that consistent monitoring and tracking take place with an established frequency to avoid new inefficiencies from arising with time.

For example, combining CI/CD tools and cloud provider metrics with a visual mechanism to be aware of speeding and defining actions to mitigate some budget troublesome situations may be a good way to operate with a cost-savings mindset.

Still not sure how to go about implementing a Cloud FinOps cycle? We’ve got you covered!

We recommend consulting with autonomous experts who can proactively propose solutions. We’ve climbed this mountain many times - we know what to look out for, we are experts in planning, organizing, developing and nurturing all the necessary capabilities for the climb. We free resources for your company and implement cost-friendly solutions so that you can focus on reaching the next growth summit. We offer Cloud FinOps as a service, following the same three steps mentioned above. The best part? Our offering is tiered, meaning we offer the service as a whole (Discovery + Optimization + Operationalization) or separately.

Strict About The Outcome. Flexible About The Process.

As your on-demand data team, Mutt Data can help you crystallize your data strategy through the design and implementation of technical capabilities and best practices. We study your company’s business goals to understand what has to change so we can help you accomplish it through a robust technical strategy with a clear roadmap and set of milestones. Talk to one of our sales reps at hi@muttdata.ai or check out our sales booklet and blog.

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