Maximize your business value and bring a culture shift with FinOps

The future of data and technology lies in the cloud. More than ever, companies rely on cloud management practices to obtain maximum business value and achieve cross-departmental unity in cost awareness and management.

FinOps, in its purest form, is organizational awareness and the processes to ensure visibility and optimization of IT spending across client departments. FinOps helps move the perception of IT as a cost center into driving proper business optimization, holding departments accountable for cloud consumption, and protecting the business from fraudulent or runaway spending.

FinOps is more than just an accounting process. Building a culture of cost accountability and facilitating organizational chargebacks helps drive the process of optimizing business operations and pursues efficiency across all aspects of a customer’s IT environment.

FinOps creates transparency between IT and financial teams when managing cloud operating costs. A robust FinOps practice allows teams to optimize cloud usage while maintaining financial control. However, it’s important to remember that FinOps is not simply about saving money. Successful FinOps helps you make money while maximizing productivity – the best of both worlds.

How does FinOps work?

The FinOps methodology can be broken down into three main categories:

Inform (Visibility):

• Define tagging strategy and pattern for the organization
• Cost governance configuration for various dimensions 
• Budget forecasts for departments, projects, and accounts 
• Report various cost drivers, custom chargebacks, and mapping spending resources 

Optimize (Recommend):

• Cost visibility and insights for the top cloud accounts, product and resource categories, tag groups, and consumption metrics 
• Cloud recommendations and policies for reserved instances, right-size, orphaned, under-utilized, or idle resources 
• Continuous resource utilization with actionable analytics 
• Template-based workload management for scheduled start and stop instances 

Operate (Real-time management):

• Real-time automated detection and remediation of unused or underutilized resources 
• Integration with ITSM tools for incident ticketing 
• Benchmarking to make comparisons with industry peers to analyze performance in terms of optimizing cost, speed, and quality 
• Cost anomaly configuration and identification of unusual spend activity

FinOps enables an organization’s ability to comprehend cloud costs while making intelligent and business focused decisions to improve value. While incorporating FinOps can be a hefty transition process, when done correctly, it helps bridge interdepartmental gaps and affirm accountability across teams while addressing cost metrics, value delivery, and financial responsibility.

How to choose the right solution to enable FinOps?

Some of the key indicators a company should look for in an effective FinOps solution include:

• Multi-cloud cost dashboards 
• Cost analytics and optimization: By identifying resource utilization, idle, and orphaned resources 
• AI/ML-based cost optimization 
• Alerting, budgeting, and forecast capabilities 
• Tagging compliance automation 
• Real-time and maturity reporting 
• The ability to integrate with ITSM systems for incident management

Altogether, these key indicators should orbit a secure platform with robust identity processes (AD/LDAP integration and role-based access control).

Conclusion

From a business standpoint, a successful FinOps practice means everybody wins. From an interdepartmental perspective, FinOps ensures a culture of cost accountability across teams and drives business operational optimization. From a customer’s viewpoint, a vendor with a robust FinOps practice provides end-to-end user efficiency and a streamlined IT environment. Incorporating FinOps into your business structure ensures only spending the money you need to make the money you want – and deserve.

Virtusa vGovern is an agnostic, poly-cloud management platform that provides companies with unified visibility across FinOps, SecOps, CloudOps, and AIOps from a single pane of glass. In collaboration with CoreStack and LogicMonitor, vGovern implements poly-cloud governance and managed operations to deliver multiple solutions, including Cost optimization, security, CloudOps automation, and round-the-clock monitoring.

Contact us to learn more about how vGovern can help boost your business’s FinOps practice and manage your global infrastructure across one secure and process-enabled managed services platform.