Why Do We Need FinOps?

According to, cloud migration was accelerated by a factor of 24 in 2020. Would it surprise you to hear that shift was being caused by a variety of factors?

Companies had to go remote quickly and securely because of COVID-19. They wished to relieve the stressed-out IT teams of the maintenance duties.

Of course, achieving that last objective is more complicated than merely going to the cloud. Finance teams must implement some governance best practices in order to benefit from migration's cost savings.

What is FinOps

The FinOps framework, to put it simply, recommends finance best practices for the cloud. To maximize the value for your business, you must optimize your cloud spending. This could involve, among other financial management strategies, negotiating prices with your vendors, monitoring and optimizing free trials, checking licenses and usage, and estimating expenditures.

"[FinOps] is the technique of adding financial responsibility to the variable spend model of cloud, enabling distributed teams to make business trade-offs between speed, cost, and quality," according to The FinOps Foundation.

Why is it Necessary?

IT professionals claim that switching to the cloud results in savings of around 20%. But not all moves will result in those financial savings. The businesses that gain the most are those with deliberate financial planning and governance.

In other words, without a competent FinOps organization, your business can be paying for stuff it doesn't need, unutilized tools, and expired licenses. Even with the built-in savings of the cloud, if you aren't paying attention, your spending can soar over time. In order to ensure that your teams are receiving the most value for the least amount of money spent, FinOps aims to emphasize constant cloud cost optimization.

Recommended FinOps Best Practices

Before Moving to the Cloud, Make FinOps Plans

The optimal time to consider FinOps is prior to migration, as with all strategic planning. This will enable you to take advantage of current opportunities like free trials and bulk user pricing as well as plan for future cost optimization in areas like scaling and shadow IT.

Also, It aids teams in comprehending the distinction between cloud-based and on-prem financial planning.

Avoid Sacrificing Value to Save Money

Saving money may be the first thought that comes to mind when we discuss cost optimization. But the underlying issue is something else. The key is to maximize the value of your dollars spent. Therefore, FinOps involves weighing those savings against their trade-offs rather than simply seeking for the lowest options along the route.

Determine Your Actual Expenses

Understanding your spending, both upfront and over time, is an important first step if FinOps is about financial accountability.

This can be more difficult than you might imagine, especially in large businesses where siloed teams might not be sharing their expenditure details at a detailed level. Because of this, it takes time to calculate total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI), and you should account for this in your deadlines and budgets.

In addition to determining current TCO and ROI, one of the main duties of FinOps practitioners is estimating future expenses and carrying out routine audits.

Make FinOps a Regular Practice in Your Organization

It's simple to imagine FinOps as a one-time strategic activity that the team must comprehend and prepare for before migrating. However, the most prosperous businesses continue after the planning phase. They establish precise, continuous roles and duties that, over time, keep expenditures under control.

This frequently entails conducting routine audits and forecasts as well as making sure the FinOps team participates in any significant software decision-making processes.

Specify Roles and Obligations

In your company, who is in charge of FinOps? Will you have a committed expert? Someone who is a part of your current cloud or financial teams? What precisely are their duties? And who from your other teams will be in charge of giving them what they require?

When deciding who will maintain your Cloud FinOps procedures, you should start by considering your IT team's newly freed up time since moving to the cloud frequently results in significant time savings and changes to their duties. Administrators have more time to think strategically about cloud investments, keep track of the tools teams across the company are using, and ensure you're getting the most out of your IT budget rather than worrying about babysitting servers, resolving bugs, and developing klunky workarounds in your on-premises software.