FinOps Explained in 5 Minutes | What is FinOps?

FinOps is a growing discipline that has become increasingly more important for organizations. One of the primary goals of FinOps is to optimize cloud costs and improve operational performance and business value.
This FinOps 101 Lightning Course is a guide to help you get started with cloud cost management.
Access the full course here: www.anglepoint...
Topics covered in the FinOps 101 course:
- Understanding FinOps: What is FinOps? Explore the core principles of FinOps and grasp the foundations that make FinOps a game-changer in today’s digital landscape.
- Why FinOps Matters: Learn how FinOps ensures cost efficiency, promotes transparency, and fosters collaboration across teams, creating a synergy between financial objectives and operational excellence.
- The FinOps Cycle: Learn how the FinOps cycle (Inform, Optimize, Operate) transforms cloud cost management into a dynamic and responsive process.
- Challenges and Solutions: Address the common challenges organizations face when implementing FinOps and discover effective solutions.
- The Future of FinOps: Peek into the crystal ball and explore the evolving landscape of FinOps - including some big developments on the horizon.
- Convergence of FinOps and ITAM: Witness the synergy between FinOps and IT Asset Management (ITAM). Understand how the convergence of these disciplines creates a powerful framework for holistic financial control and governance.
Access the full course here: www.anglepoint...
What is FinOps?
FinOps, a portmanteau of “Finance” and “(Dev)Ops,” is a cutting-edge approach and cultural practice focused on cloud financial management, aiming to maximize business value by aligning engineering, IT, finance, and business teams.
The primary goal of FinOps is to optimize the costs associated with running workloads in the cloud, ensuring that organizations can maximize the value they get from their cloud investments while maintaining financial control.
That said, FinOps is not only about cost savings or finding wastage in the cloud. It also provides visibility for all and seeks to ensure accountability for cloud resources. Teams are encouraged to take ownership of the resources they use and understand the financial implication of the decisions they make. FinOps gives the needed insight into spending patterns, cost drivers, and other metrics that support data-driven decisions.
FinOps also includes governance practices to establish policies and guidelines for cloud resource usage.
Central to FinOps is the collaboration between cross-functional teams, promoting said visibility, best practices, and accountability to the variable spending model of cloud computing. Everyone in the organization, from engineers to finance leaders, takes ownership of their cloud costs.
FinOps & the Iron Triangle
FinOps guides decision-making based on the business value of cloud services. It emphasizes making informed trade-offs between cost, performance, and time to market, ensuring that cloud investments drive optimal value for the organization. This is the Iron Triangle of FinOps.
The three components of the FinOps Iron Triangle are cost, quality, and speed. When organizations focus on one of these components, they must make sacrifices to the others. For example, many organizations want to increase their savings in the cloud, this means they may have to start limiting resources or reducing their flexibility. Or, if you want to be more agile and innovative, you may need to increase your risk or costs to focus on achieving that agility.
Therefore, it's essential for your organization to decide what is most important and how you are going to balance cost, quality, and speed. FinOps brings teams together so that they can choose which trade-offs make sense and where they need to place their focus.
FinOps Crawl, Walk, Run Phases
The Crawl, Walk, Run phases of FinOps are a common way that organizations can measure where they are at in FinOps as a whole, and within certain, individual aspects of FinOps. Each phase symbolizes a level of maturity and capability, with the understanding that an organization progresses through these stages gradually.
Organizations might be in different phases for different aspects of FinOps. For example, a company might be in the Crawl phase for cost allocation and tagging, but it could also be in the Run phase for cost avoidance. It’s okay to be in different phases within different areas of FinOps and different areas of the business. FinOps is modular, it’s meant to accommodate and help organizations work through all challenges.