FINOPS AND FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT PRACTICES

FinOps touches on a set of practices in cloud computing for efficient management of cloud financial operations through process automation, analytics, resource optimization and governance. Just as DevOps revolutionized application development & operations, FinOps looks to maximize cloud’s financial value.

As cloud has matured from an innovation means to a industrialization requirement, managing cloud costs has become a priority for most enterprises. With the complexity of sprawling multi-cloud deployments spanning thousands of resources, doing this efficiently calls for FinOps.

It helps with…

Informed decision making: Granular cost accounting, accountability and insights derived from usage, allocation and benchmarking data rather than rudimentary billing, empowers intelligent cloud investment.

Proactive management: Continuously optimizing utilization based on workload profiling and active monitoring instead of reactive responses is critical for guaranteeing ROI.

Application-centricity: Tracking the full-stack ownership costs for each workload highlights optimization areas otherwise masked by aggregated billing.

Strategic governance: Company-wide policies, controls, quotas and actionable recommendations prescriptively manage consumption across business units while allowing flexibility.

By considering cloud a capital, not an operational expense, FinOps brings financial accountability to on-demand consumption. Just as DevOps improved application reliability & deployment velocity through SRE practices, FinOps aims to improve cloud affordability, value and incentives through SFE – Site Financial Engineering.

FinOps certified practitioners serve as cloud financial advisors to translate cloud billing data into tailored recommendations balancing business needs, budgets and innovations based on analytics. Procedural controls and cultural shifts further drive efficiency.

As cloud transformations accelerate, careful yet agile FinOps creates visibility, focus and urgency towards maximizing cloud’s economies of skill while minimizing waste. Business units gain strategic autonomy within appropriate guardrails and centralized teams guide priorities through trusted advisors rather than rigid policing.