FinOps is one of the newest terms used by organizations or individuals utilizing cloud solutions and services. It mostly involves organizations trying to reduce cloud spending while ensuring they keep up with quality, speed, and goals.
In this article, you will learn the benefits organizations derive from implementing FinOps and best practices to help them reduce cloud costs.
Benefits Of Cloud FinOps Practices
FinOps ensures that an organization uses the most suitable cloud computing services for its day-to-day operations while maintaining several limits with costs. Cloud FinOps definition means that an organization uses the best cloud solutions that suit its objectives when ensuring it stays within its budget. FinOps practices are raising awareness around an organization’s cloud service usage to prevent overspending.
Organizations can derive so many benefits when they start integrating cloud FinOps into their operations in the cloud, and they include:
● Cost Reduction
The most obvious benefit of cloud FinOps is that the organization implementing it will reduce unnecessary expenses, which have been going under the radar. Assuming a company was using a cloud service that wasn’t beneficial to them, FinOps practices help eliminate these wastages.
● Cost Awareness
Creating and implementing FinOps practices in an organization helps create cost awareness in such an organization. Those working in such organizations automatically become aware that they must reduce unnecessary expenses in their cloud usage.
● Alignment With the Organization’s Objectives
Integrating FinOps best practices in an organization will help them buy cloud services that align with their current and future goals.
FinOps Best Practices to Optimize Cloud Costs
● Create a FinOps Team
A core team designed to oversee and implement an organization’s cloud cost optimization strategies will greatly reduce cloud costs. This team can be called any name, but their job in any organization is to enforce FinOps policies and strategies.
Besides enforcing an organization’s cloud goals and usage policies, the FinOps team also has another delicate job. Their job is to look for opportunities to help reduce the amount an organization spends on its cloud solutions. For instance, these FinOps teams will be responsible for looking for discounts on the cloud services used by a company to make things easier. A good recommendation is that the FinOps team should come from every department of the organization, such as finance, product, and engineering.
● Look for Discounts
When choosing a plan for their cloud service, a company should go for those that will offer them discounts and provide the most value for them. Cloud services and products mostly come with different plans and payment options, such as monthly and yearly plans.
These payment plans and options also come with discounts and price reductions. Assuming your organization needs a cloud computing service for more than a year, go for the yearly subscription while making a subscription. Going for a subscription like this will give you access to discounts of up to 70 or 80 percent. A solution like Globaldot may be perfect for finding the best cloud services that suit your business objectives and better payment plans.
● Visibility
If an organization doesn’t know how much they are losing in their cloud spend, they won’t know how to prevent such loss from reoccurring. Sometimes there are some cloud services that organizations are no longer using, but they are still paying for them without knowledge.
However, adding more visibility to an organization will allow them to get expansive insights into the products they use and how much they spend. When there’s visibility, they would know when a product or service is about to expire and if they need to continue using it. Assuming an organization doesn’t need the service anymore, having visibility will alert them not to renew such service. In other words, having enough visibility is a FinOps practice that will help an organization prevent potential wastages.
● Proactively Right-Size Cloud Resources
Many organizations use cloud services that are not meant for them or do not fit their business structure and goals. For instance, some organizations are paying for cloud services meant for 100 people when there are only 20 in the company. Before an organization buys a cloud resource, it should ensure it fits its size and objectives.
Right-sizing an organization’s cloud resources manually can be very stressful, and the organization might omit some details. However, automated solutions like Globaldot will provide you with the exact cloud service that suits your organization’s size and goals.
● Training and Education
Everyone in an organization should be involved if they want to effectively cut down the cost of using cloud solutions. In several organizations, almost every department uses one or more cloud solutions. So, every department must be educated on cloud costs and how to reduce the amount spent on cloud resources.
Educating each department about cloud cost optimization will help create awareness and responsibility. It will also help anyone in the organization to be able to detect when there’s wastage or unnecessary expenses in cloud spending.
Wrapping Up
Cloud FinOps is an important practice that every organization should advocate for and implement if they want to reduce the amount they spend on cloud services. FinOps practice is the act of ensuring that an organization meets all its cloud goals while taking into account the amount it will spend on getting cloud resources.
To achieve this aim, an organization must put some FinOps practices in place and implement them. Some examples of these FinOps practices include training and educating employees, providing visibility, looking for discounts, and having a FinOps team.
