The most common question related to using FinOps for cloud cost management I'm asked is consistently, “How do I save the most money?” The common misconception is that saving money should be the end all, be all, question you should answer. But let’s change our thinking on that. Instead let’s consider a better question… “How do I get the best business value from my cloud usage?”
Why do we need to change how we think of using and paying for the cloud from cost savings to business value? A perfect example of this would be with a company who receives the vast majority of its orders through it’s company website. If you began to receive complaints that orders were hard to enter, that the website was slow or performing poorly, or that essential customer access features were missing how would you respond? By cutting costs on your website? No! Instead, due to its business value you’d probably reinvest in your website to make it accessible, fast and useful to your clients.
So how do we define what that business value is? By looking at the needs of each organization specifically through the lens of the FinOps methodology. Much like Agile, FinOps is based on a cyclical process of investigation, planning, and then completion. FinOps three main phases and their roles are:
· Inform – This phase is where you discover all that there is to know about your cloud infrastructure. You will be reviewing usage, diving into your cloud storage policies, determining how your organization uses tagging, and making certain that you understand as much as possible related to your current spend and usage.
· Optimize – This phase is where you will prioritize and triage the information you discovered in the Inform phase. In this phase the FinOps team can determine a fact-based plan to address the specific business needs discovered during the Inform phase. This will include prioritizing what changes will provide the largest business value to the company.
· Operate – This phase is where the rubber hits the road. Based on the plans created during the Optimize phase the FinOps team can work directly with the appropriate teams to enact these choices. Plans may be adapted, delayed, or even restructured during this phase but the result is always to provide the best business value from our choices.
Let’s think of our website example again. By using the Inform phase we discover the specifics of why our website wasn’t working as well as needed. We can make informed choices of how to resolve these issues during our Optimize phase that will support improved business values. During the Operate phase we’ll put these decisions into action to provide the specific types of business values that will best support our organizations.
Apptio and IBM are focused on supporting the FinOps methodology and recognize it as the best current methodology for maintaining your cloud cost and usage. By using the best practices and north star principles of the FinOps methodology we’ve repeatedly aided our clients in being empowered to fully understand cloud usage and costs. We look forward to supporting all our member organizations with using this methodology and hope you join us in our FinOps Certified Practitioner courses soon!