By Deepak Mittal, CEO and Founder of CloudKeeper
Cloud FinOps will be leveraged beyond cost savings evolving into a comprehensive business enabler, say prominent industry analysts. The data from the State of FinOps Report 2024, paints a clear picture: FinOps is not a one-time fix, but an essential practice for continually aligning cloud spending with evolving business goals.
FinOps ensures continued cost optimization while adapting to new cloud adoption strategies and changing business landscapes. However, cloud FinOps frameworks are often viewed as a means of simply reducing cloud bills.
This short-sighted view of cost-cutting hinders the true value of cloud computing and overlooks the true potential of FinOps. Let’s delve deeper and explore why FinOps is an ongoing process that ensures your cloud spending aligns with your evolving business needs, promotes responsible innovation, and ultimately fuels growth.
Cloud environments are dynamic: Your cloud usage evolves as your business grows. A one-time cost fix won’t address new resources, changing workloads, or emerging technologies like AI. FinOps, however, is an ongoing process that adapts to these changes, ensuring your cloud spending aligns with your evolving needs.
Business goals are fluid: What’s cost-effective today may not be tomorrow. A startup, for instance, prioritises rapid innovation, requiring readily available, scalable cloud resources. As it matures, cost-efficiency might become more crucial. FinOps ensures your cloud spending reflects these shifting goals, allowing you to strategically scale up or down.
Innovation is a new Vitamin for businesses: A major misconception is that FinOps teams stifle innovation. However, the truth is that FinOps promotes responsible spending, not frugality. By optimising costs, FinOps frees up resources for innovation, empowers experimentation and also offers a faster time to market for these offerings.
New project launches: FinOps helps you “right-size” resources from the beginning. It analyzes your project needs and recommends the most appropriate cloud resources, preventing unnecessary costs and ensuring your project starts with a sound financial foundation.
Scaling existing services: As workloads fluctuate, FinOps identifies opportunities to optimize resource allocation, recommending services like auto-scaling, which automatically adjusts cloud resources based on real-time demand.
Additionally, FinOps helps you leverage cost-saving features like committed use discounts, ensuring you only pay for the resources you consistently use.
Emerging technologies: While emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), offer immense potential, their cloud costs can be unpredictable. FinOps provides insights into AI resource consumption, enabling you to experiment responsibly without exceeding budgetary constraints.
Beyond cost savings
FinOps offers a treasure trove of benefits beyond simple cost savings:
Improved forecasting: FinOps practices enhance your understanding of cloud costs, providing clear visibility into your cloud spending. With this financial intelligence, you can create more accurate forecasts and budget plans.
Empowered teams: FinOps fosters collaboration between finance, engineering, and business teams, breaking down silos and creating a productive working relationship. Finance provides budgetary constraints and cost insights, engineering leverages this knowledge to optimise cloud usage while business teams leverage reports to get assurance that cloud investments are aligned with business objectives.
Sustainability: In today’s environmentally conscious world, FinOps plays a vital role. By right-sizing resources, FinOps helps reduce your cloud footprint and energy consumption.
These advantages all tie back to a core truth: FinOps is a continuous practice that ensures your cloud spending aligns with business goals, promotes responsible resource management, and ultimately fuels innovation and growth. By embracing FinOps as an ongoing journey, businesses can understand cloud spending better and learn how to profit by deriving business value from cloud investments, instead of just focusing on reducing costs.
