The levels of FinOps maturity
Companies with mature FinOps models are measuring unit economics - they know every resource in the cloud, what it’s being used for, and what revenue it generates. That’s considered advanced level FinOps and isn’t where most organizations start their journey. FinOps maturity happens in the following phases
Phase 1: Crawl
The goal of this stage is to obtain visibility into your cloud spend as well as create a system of shared accountability by showing teams and stakeholders what is being spent, where it’s being spent, and why. This stage doesn’t yet require a cultural shift and is relatively fast and simple to perform, but it leaves you with the information needed to see and understand the whole cloud spend picture.
Phase 2: Walk
Optimization begins in this next phase, which requires taking deliberate action to reduce cloud spend by identifying and removing unused resources, turning off resources outside of the hours they are used, and other measures. Ideally, the impact of these measures on speed to delivery and performance is minimal, while cost savings of as much as 20 to 30 percent are realized.
Phase 3: Run
This final stage is the advanced level described previously. Here, processes are defined and executed that align overall business goals with technology and finance. At this level, the cloud is being used efficiently, often saving costs over equivalent on-premises setups. Budgets are also more easily managed as spend is tied directly to the estimated value of each cloud use case.
Progressing through these phases of maturity typically results in increasingly optimized cloud spend, helping you achieve your goal of maximizing every dollar spent in the cloud.