Although companies are investing in Cloud Financial Management (FinOps), a gap still remains. Despite wanting to put FinOps in place, organizations lack the ability to appropriately implement the program.
Through automation, however, companies can cut back on repetitive, manual tasks and save the time and money they need. Let’s dig into how you can start using automation to take your Cloud Financial Management strategy to the next level.
Before you invest in any sort of automation technology, it’s important to ensure your team is ready to use it. Technology is only part of the solution - organizations need to understand where they are on their FinOps journey, understand the FinOps methodology, identify key FinOps stakeholders and ensure that Procurement, Finance and Engineering teams have a seat at the table.
Organizations everywhere have increasingly looked to build FinOps teams. This is because companies now recognize the value of this integrated approach, with research indicating a 75% growth growth in the number of FinOps teams. Despite these initiatives, however, many companies are still struggling to adopt a FinOps approach to cloud spend because they lack the right expertise and resources.
Employees wear multiple hats throughout their day-to-day, and they can only manage cloud spend as part of a larger job function. Even when organizations hire employees specifically for FinOps management roles, they often need to provide training. Successfully implementing FinOps requires experienced professionals and building processes into the DevOps practice.
Overall, organizations need the right expertise to help them move toward streamlining their processes and adopting automation.
Procurement teams are the glue that holds FinOps together. Procurement needs to be involved throughout the process, not just after the bill comes in the mail.
Instead of making the procurement team research on the backend of the process, organizations need to give them the ability to take proactive actions. FinOps enables this by creating a cohesive, centralized team that includes procurement, directly integrating them into the decision-making process.
Fundamentally, the Engineering team needs to help drive the FinOps automation process. They understand who uses cloud resources and how the resources should be used.
The engineering team will especially benefit from automation because it enables them to prove governance over cloud spend and usage. If the goal of automation is to detect idle resources and remediate the problem, then automation will take one large responsibility off their plate.
Then, by bringing together the engineering and procurement teams, organizations can create more robust strategies for managing cloud spend. Through using FinOps automation, Engineering teams can implement suggestions identified by the Finance and Procurement teams. Meanwhile, the Finance and Procurement teams will also gain visibility into the mission-critical usage requirements that the engineering team has.
Leveraging automation helps reduce the repetitive manual tasks that ultimately lead to cost overrun. As a company moves to establish or mature its FinOps practices, it needs to formalize goals for incorporating mission-critical automation.
As with any set of practices, FinOps automation decisions should begin with defining the objectives. To define the intended outcome, organizations need to determine whether the goal is to:
Once the organization defines the objectives, it can set the key metrics for proving the automation’s value.
If the organization has a tagging standard, then automation mitigates opportunities for human error. After identifying resources with missing or incorrectly applied tags, the FinOps team can leverage automation to stop or block resources to address tagging violations.
By automating start/stop scheduling, organizations are able to prevent idle resources. For example, a company may choose to stop a resource during the weekend hours while no one is using it. With automation, the resource can be brought back online before people are in the office on Monday morning.
Organizations can use reduction automation to send teams alerts, helping enhance cost optimization plans. Your automation solution should ingest resource data from services, then send the responsible parties an alert indicating they need to investigate usage. This helps optimize cloud resource usage and eliminate wasted spend.
Without visibility, it’s difficult to right-size and right-cost. Get in touch with our CCO and FinOps experts to gain the visibility and expertise you need.
Without visibility, it’s difficult to right-size and right-cost. Get in touch with our CCO and FinOps experts to gain the visibility and expertise you need.
