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Build a FinOps Strategy to Enable Dynamic Cloud Cost Management

Maximize cloud value to power exponential technologies.

For many organizations, jumping on the cloud bandwagon has not translated into immediate cost savings. Complex pricing models, misallocation of resources, and other hidden expenses have resulted in soaring cloud costs. Our blueprint provides guidance on building a FinOps strategy to improve cloud cost management and prepare your organization for an exponential IT future.

With the accelerated development of exponential technologies, organizations need a dynamic cloud platform to support an autonomous AI-driven ecosystem. Advanced FinOps will be essential for IT and the entire organization to effectively control and optimize cloud expenditures for maximum value.

1. The cloud isn’t cheap – proactively manage your cloud spend to reap its benefits.

The value of the cloud can be found not in direct cost savings, but in benefits such as flexibility, scalability, and speed of delivery. Cloud costs must be closely managed and right-sized to your needs to ensure that cloud spend delivers maximum value.

2. Get your cloud goals in line with the objectives of your organization.

FinOps is not just about cost management. It helps organizations ensure their cloud spending is aligned with their organizational goals – misalignment of resources with goals will stand in the way of cost savings, agility enhancement, and innovation.

3. Take ownership of your cloud ecosystem with effective governance.

Overcome the challenges of cloud cost management with cross-functional FinOps practices that break down the walls between Finance, IT, and other departments. Develop cost management policies, build budgets and benchmarks, and make users accountable for their cloud usage.

4. You must start with the FinOps basics, but don’t stop there.

To power exponential technologies, you’ll need advanced AI-assisted FinOps practices that will enable and expedite your cloud cost management initiatives. Think predictive data analytics to evaluate expenses and extract metrics, and automated systems to autonomize routine cost management tasks.

Use our framework to build a FinOps strategy that boosts cloud value with advanced analytics, forecasting, and automation

Our research guides you through best practices to build a FinOps foundation that provides visibility into resource utilization and implements benchmarking and budgeting to enable forecasting. It also provides step-by-step guidance to adopting AI-powered technologies for proactive cloud resource and cost management and anomaly detection. Use this blueprint, tools, and templates to:

  • Develop a FinOps strategic plan that aligns with your financial goals with our three-phase approach.
  • Establish financial transparency with strategy and policy templates to streamline granular tracking and analysis of cloud expenditure.
  • Employ advanced and predictive data analytics capabilities to evaluate cloud expenses and extract insightful metrics. Support the process with performance tracking, roles and responsibilities, and roadmap templates.
  • Determine selection criteria and use cases for automated systems to autonomize routine cloud cost management tasks. Assess solutions with our vendor evaluation workbook.

Build a FinOps Strategy to Enable Dynamic Cloud Cost Management Research & Tools

1. Build a FinOps Strategy to Enable Dynamic Cloud Cost Management Deck – A step-by-step blueprint to help you build FinOps processes for efficient cloud cost management and prepare to use automation for proactive cloud resource management.

Use this blueprint to learn how to build a strategy for FinOps adoption. This research:

  • Helps you put processes in place for efficient cloud cost management.
  • Guides you through best practices to lay a FinOps foundation by providing visibility into resource utilization and implementing benchmarking and budgeting to enable forecasting.
  • Provides a step-by-step guide to adopt AI-powered technologies for proactive cloud resource and cost management and anomaly detection.

2. FinOps Strategy Template – A leadership-ready presentation template that helps you summarize your FinOps strategy.

Use this template to help visualize and communicate the specifics related to your FinOps practices. Follow the guidelines in the blueprint and record activity results from the first two phases in this template. The findings will be presented to the management team and all stakeholders.

3. Cloud Cost Management Policy – A structured template to document your cloud cost management policies.

Use this template as a starting point for addressing policy gaps. Follow the blueprint activities and document results in this template to build a complete policy for cloud cost management and record your expectations around tagging, metrics, and cost control.

4. Performance Scorecard Template – A template to set a motivating system for improving cost management.

This template can be used to encourage resource utilization improvements between teams. Record each team’s current state and target state for cloud resource management.

5. FinOps Roles and Terminology Guide – A formal template that helps you document FinOps roles and common FinOps terminology.

Use this template to brainstorm centric FinOps roles and their responsibilities. Also use it to record common FinOps terms and their definitions to make sure that all stakeholders understand the FinOps language.

6. FinOps Roadmap – An Excel-based roadmap tool to help create an action plan for your FinOps project.

Use this roadmap tool in conjunction with the project blueprint to define FinOps project tasks, their owners, priorities, and timeline.

7. FinOps Vendor Evaluation Workbook – A detailed spreadsheet to help you formalize selection of cloud cost management platforms and set the starting point for platform evaluation.

Use this spreadsheet to:

  • Identify detailed features.
  • Prioritize each feature according to their importance and the value they will provide.
  • Evaluate solutions to narrow down to a list of platforms and support deeper conversations with vendors.

8. Build a FinOps Strategy to Enable Dynamic Cloud Cost Management Deck – Learn how to kick-start your FinOps with best practices that lead to significantly improved operational efficiency and higher contribution to strategic outcomes.

In an increasingly cloud-centric world, cost management can be a competitive differentiator. FinOps allows savvy CIOs to align strategic cloud cost management with business or organizational objectives. Improve your IT-business integration with AI-assisted cost forecasting and automation.

Learn more in this Info-Tech LIVE 2024 presentation.


Maximize cloud value to power exponential technologies.

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

You Get:

  1. Build a FinOps Strategy to Enable Dynamic Cloud Cost Management Deck
  2. FinOps Strategy Template
  3. Cloud Cost Management Policy
  4. Performance Scorecard
  5. FinOps Roles and Terminology Guide
  6. FinOps Roadmap
  7. FinOps Vendor Evaluation Workbook

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Author

Mahmoud Ramin

Contributors

  • Angela McCarthy, Senior Manager, Infrastructure and Enterprise Services, NSCC
  • Amy Ashby, FinOps Lead, Under Armour
  • 6 anonymous external contributors

Search Code: 104910
Last Revised: June 6, 2024

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