What is FinOps and why does it matter?
Most organisations are now deep into their cloud journeys. But despite the benefits the cloud delivers in terms of scalability, flexibility and efficiency, the average IT department is struggling to keep cloud spending under control. A recent Forrester survey found that 72% of IT decision-makers reported that their companies exceeded their cloud budgets in the most recent fiscal year.
The challenge that enterprises face is that the cloud represents an entirely new model for IT procurement. Their old ways of forecasting and managing spend are not aligned with the variable costs of the cloud. They need a smarter way to track, manage and optimise cloud spending. Enter FinOps, or Cloud Financial Operations.
What is FinOps?
The FinOps Foundation defines FinOps as: “The practice of bringing financial accountability to the variable spend model of cloud, enabling distributed teams to make business trade-offs between speed, cost and quality.” FinOps bridges the gap between finance, operations and engineering teams to manage cloud spending efficiently.
By embracing FinOps, your organisation can gain control over cloud expenses while maintaining business agility. FinOps empowers you with the tools and practices you need to manage real-time operational expenditure, making your spending decisions based on real-time insight and accurate forecasts.
Why should you care?
As IDC notes, the cloud dominates tech spending across infrastructure, platforms and applications. Worldwide spending on public cloud services is forecast to reach $805 billion in 2024 and to double in size by 2028, achieving a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.4%. Since the cloud is now the preferred model for buying and using IT, every organisation needs to master FinOps.
FinOps isn’t just a solution—it’s a framework that enables you to control costs while driving operational efficiency in the cloud. Some of the reasons FinOps is essential for your business include:
Gain transparency into cloud spending:
Tracking cloud expenditure across different teams and business units in hybrid and multi-cloud environments is complex without proper financial governance. FinOps enables you to get better visibility of your cloud estate, so you can make better decisions.
Accurately budget and forecast cloud expenses:
Cloud bill shock has become commonplace, with many organisations reporting runaway costs. FinOps tools and practices help you to better forecast and manage cloud consumption through seasonal peaks and troughs.
Optimise spending:
With FinOps, you can get proactive about managing costs and optimising usage. You can optimise cloud environments to align with cloud providers’ best practices, such as Well-Architected Frameworks. In addition, you’ll be able to track commitment discounts, unused instances and other elements of cloud spending more accurately to enhance ROI.
Ensure financial accountability across departments:
The visibility FinOps brings to cloud spending makes it easier for you to allocate costs to teams, departments and cost centres. You can show teams exactly how much budget they’re using and which resources they’re consuming, as well as detect and enforce cloud cost policy violations.
Improve cloud performance:
FinOps isn’t just about saving money—it’s a set of practices that can help you streamline the management of cloud resources. This, in turn, can help you to improve quality, agility and risk management, so that you can drive better business outcomes from IT spending.
Enable FinOps in your business
At Nebula, we have years of experience in technology expense management and cloud operating models. Our OneView Cloud Expense Management (CEM) module helps you to budget and forecast accurately, optimise your cloud environment and implement best practices aligned to the cloud providers’ Well-Architected Frameworks.
But we are more than just a software provider—we are a certified member of the FinOps Foundation, with certified experts ready to offer specialised guidance in navigating the complexities of multi-cloud environments. Through 1Nebula’s innovative OneView Cloud Expense Management (CEM) solution, you can seamlessly adopt FinOps practices.
Start optimising today
Our expertise is designed to help businesses unlock the full potential of their cloud investments. Our OneView CEM solution covers all key FinOps domains, empowering you to take control of cloud expenses with greater precision and accountability. Visit https://www.1nebula.com/finops or contact our certified FinOps experts to start optimising your cloud expenses.