FinOps - the Fundamentals of Cloud Financial Optimization
Are you familiar with the term cloud financial optimization? Do you know how to implement it effectively as a key practice in your company, while using it to revolutionize multi-team cooperation and improve the predictability of the company’s finances? If so, we’ve got your back!
Cloud financial optimization, aka FinOps, is considered by many to be one of the essential processes in every enterprise. It is capable of functionalities that often need to be optimized for the company to do an effective job as a whole, such as data analysis, cost allocation, budget management, resource utilization, and many more.
Discover FinOps
Let’s start from the beginning with a simple yet crucial question: what is FinOps?
As you already know, FinOps is a short form for processes such as cloud financial optimization, cloud financial management, and cloud cost management. According to the FinOps Foundation, “FinOps is an evolving cloud financial management discipline and cultural practice that enables organizations to get maximum business value by helping engineering, finance, technology and business teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions”.
What’s even more interesting is the origin of the name of this concept. The word FinOps was created by combining finance and DevOps. Knowing that, it’s significantly easier to notice the values standing behind the entire process, meaning the focus on business and engineering teams’ cooperation to achieve common goals.
FinOps Principles
When considering cloud financial optimization, you must remember that there are six principles, also called “north stars”, which represent best practices recommended to follow during the process:
- Teams need to collaborate
- Everyone takes ownership of their cloud usage
- A centralized team drives FinOps
- Reports should be accessible and timely
- Decisions are driven by the business value of the cloud
- You should take advantage of the variable cost model of the cloud
Keep in mind that there is no need to deploy the above-mentioned principles in a particular order. However, it’s essential to treat them as a single entity.
FinOps at Comarch
At Comarch, we focus on the most important challenge of getting engineers to take action. We aim to raise awareness of what FinOps is and how crucial it is in everyone’s daily work, including:
- Developers – to think about how they write their code to be cost-efficient
- DevOps – to set up environments using the infrastructure as a code approach, automate deployment-related tasks, and set up cost monitoring
- IT architects – to include cost estimates in system design
- Product owners – to be aware of how business requirements affect system finances
FinOps is an iterative approach based on constant monitoring and improvements. Only by experience we are able to improve our skills.
If you’d like to discover more about solutions offered by Comarch, especially those involving software and hardware services, visit our website or contact us using the dedicated form.