Optimizing cloud consumption through FinOps

FinOps aims to set up all the tools and processes to master the variable cloud cost model. What exactly is it used for and how do you set it up? Read More

It is worthwhile to access and recalibrate the financial models associated with the cloud to take full advantage of it. This is precisely the role of the new profession of FinOps. Its mission is to set up all the tools and processes to master the cloud's variable cost model. To achieve this, it integrates the needs of agility, performance, security and quality of service in order to optimize business applications. What exactly is it used for, and how do you set it up?

The three dimensions of FinOps

The goal of FinOps is to take up the financial management of the company's cloud transformation. Setting up an economic model integrates the new modes of cloud resource consumption and invoicing of these services by working on three dimensions. These dimensions are

1. Inform: shed full light on costs, uses and cloud services, share best practices - compare costs according to performance and requested SLAs and set up metrics for financial monitoring. Additionally, users must be trained in acceptable practices in terms of use and consumption.
2. Operate and control: implement governance rules, continuously measure the alignment between business objectives and the rendering of the application (quality, costs, performance), serve as a platform for exchange between Businesses, IT and Finance, control consumption and financial projections.
3. Optimize: make the best use of the services of cloud providers to optimize costs, adjust templates, manage stops and start of services in quasi-real-time and automated.

The Set-up

The first difficulty is to measure your investment in this area, according to the utility-cost ratio. If your investment is on a small scale, then just moving to the cloud requires FinOps rules. Moreover, depending on the level of cloud consumption, it is preferable to have a manager or even a team whose costs will have to be absorbed.

Therefore, if it is only an extension of existing data centers, the implementation of best practices and suitable tools or the use of shared FinOps services will suffice. But, if your strategy is a complete migration to the public cloud, setting up a FinOps team becomes mandatory to avoid consuming too much.

Even the implementation process is relatively quick: around six months.

• It will always start with a maturity audit to identify the areas of development and actions to be implemented.
• A second step will consist of putting the consumption and invoices under control to obtain consumption reporting.
• Thirdly, we will define the economic reporting; then we will mark the resources associated with the management mode. This involves building a financial dashboard of all the applications before choosing and setting up financial monitoring tools and automated processes.
• Last step: Integration of a 'Financial Operating Center' will guarantee the process's sustainability by defining the trajectory.

However, the full appropriation of good practices, the understanding of the new economic model, and the upgrading of all the teams' skills are essential for the real success of the transformation. Therefore, evangelization of new uses and the management of change must be an integral part of the process across all stages.

The Deployment Roadblock

Too many companies want to migrate to the public cloud, without setting up a FinOps approach, for lack of a team. For the public cloud to be really cheaper, you need to financially control its use, thanks to FinOps. Ideally, this approach will be implemented simultaneously as cloud migration, but it can be deployed as a posteriori. Because analyzing the uses, your users make of their applications allows you, above all, to adapt them to their needs. Bringing together IT, finance, and businesses ... isn't that the real promise of the cloud?

Partnering With The Right Cloud Provider

Have any cloud management woes that you are unable to resolve? Is your IT team too small to handle your cloud storage needs? Then what you need is a cloud provider with the expertise to fully-manage your cloud infrastructure. We allow you to keep an eye on your usage and proactively monitor, while effectively cutting down on associated expenditure.

VEXXHOST offers fully managed cloud solutions for all your business needs. If you are looking for a highly dedicated and secure cloud, OpenStack private cloud is for you. But, if you are operating with unpredictable workloads, then an OpenStack public cloud will do the trick. Guess what? We have got both! Reach out to our cloud experts to determine which cloud service is best suited for your use case and stay tuned for some exciting announcement on our public cloud storage!