Your guiding lights: The 6 principles of FinOps

02/08/2022
Posted in FinOps
02/08/2022 Bart Van Hecke

Venturing into the world of FinOps, you will quickly realize you need to embrace the six FinOps principles. They will guide your company to reorganize and make long-term cultural changes. Through this you will gain a better view on how you use your cloud infrastructure and how you can improve on that. These six principles were developed by FinOps Foundation members, based on their expertise, and honed through experience. So let’s take a look at what they are and what they entail exactly.

#1 Business value 

This principle demands that decision-making is driven by the business value of the cloud. The team that manages your cloud setup should always keep in mind how they can optimize the business value when building, designing and finetuning your cloud infrastructure. With the help of FinOps, you can evaluate your results by comparing them with your industry peers. Learn from best practices and let team benchmarking drive you to improve and excel.

#2 Centralization 

FinOps needs a centralized and committed team to run smoothly and efficiently. Financial data should be collected and analyzed in one place. This ensures general oversight into cloud costs and spending. The need to up- or downscale and any opportunity to optimize the budget becomes visible a lot faster. Any additional purchases or negotiations can be combined to receive the best possible pricing.

#3 Collaboration 

For FinOps to work, all the teams involved need to collaborate consistently. This thorough way of collaborating will allow for your teams to learn from each other. They will be able to build on that new knowledge and constantly review their way of working, which will level up their workflow and processes. Collaboration encourages teams to take a fresh look at their tasks from the point of view of their collaborators. It will encourage them to try new things and take into account how their actions might affect their fellow collaborators. This ultimately results in enhanced creativity, innovation and efficiency.

#4 Opportunity

Working in the cloud comes with a whole new range of opportunities. Organizations are able to design their cloud infrastructure to perfectly fit their needs. This is not a static situation: it can be scaled up and down as needed. This customizability also means that you only pay for what you actually use. Make sure you make the best use of the variable cost model the cloud has to offer to get the most out of your budget.

#5 Ownership

FinOps can only work if all involved cloud users take ownership of how they use the cloud environment. Each team needs to feel empowered enough to take responsibility for their own cloud budget and usage. A very useful tool to use is to set team-level targets. Every cloud collaborator will feel accountable and eager to achieve their targets, and every team member will feel involved and carry their own weight.

#6 Transparency

The only way FinOps can generate trustworthy results is by making sure the data is collected and analyzed correctly and consistently. This data can then be translated into reports for further follow-up. It’s very important that these reports are generated on a regular basis. They should be made accessible to all the teams involved. Fast feedback gives you the chance to react and adjust when necessary.

Cloudar is an active member of the FinOps Alliance. Do you need guidance on implementing the principles of FinOps? Do you want to optimize your cloud spendure without losing oversight? Contact us and let’s find out how we can help make these principles a part of your organization’s culture!

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