Maximizing Cloud Value with FinOps

Overview

Cloud FinOps is a defined as “an evolving cloud financial management discipline and cultural practice that enables organizations to get maximum business value by helping engineering, finance, technology and business teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions” by the FinOps Foundation Technical Advisory Council. It ensures delivery of the desired value from cloud adoption by ensuring the right structure is in place, right processes are followed, and governance is in place. And it is no surprise that Cloud FinOps is a critical part of any enterprise’ cloud strategy with its promise of helping them get the most out of their cloud investments and achieve their business goals.

However, while the concept of FinOps seems to be straightforward, in the absence of well-implemented FinOps solutions, enterprises are struggling with a wide range of issues.

Infosys takes a battle assessed approach in establishing the FinOps discipline and brings in the relevant tools to deliver the services in most efficient and effective manner complementing the existing cloud teams in any enterprise.

Establish Cloud FinOps practice
Deployment of FinOps tools
Reporting, recommendations, and forecasting
Cost optimization implementation

Implementing FinOps in the most efficient and effective manner, complementing the existing cloud teams within any enterprise using the appropriate tools.

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Infosys’ well-laid out approach for Cloud FinOps ensures:

All stakeholders are aligned on the objectives, right operating model, clear budgeting structure and value tracking framework.
Teams of business finance and cloud professionals working together to deliver services across governance, reporting and implementation.
Right set of tools deployed from Infosys Cobalt portfolio to bring in best practice in institutionalizing Cloud FinOps.

Establishing the Cloud FinOps Practice

FinOps operating model design, service catalogue, and RACI. Creation of value definition and tracking framework.
Creation of finance accounting structure, mapping to business units, budgeting structure, defining the cloud resources tagging strategy and derivation of the cost allocation models to various business units.

Deployment of FinOps tools

Identification of tools for FinOps processes including cost allocation and reporting, optimization recommendations and execution tracking
Deployment of tools and integration with cloud service providers, finance system
Creation of dashboards as per persona, and building distribution mechanism

Reporting, recommendations, and forecasting

Timely distribution of high-fidelity cost consumption reports with cost allocation as defined.
Identification of anomalies on cloud consumption and bring pro-active identification of cause and take appropriate actions on time.
Identification of optimization opportunities across usage optimization, right pricing, tools optimization, deployment optimization and architecture optimization
Correlation of cloud consumption to business workloads and usage in creation of accurate consumption forecasting.

Cost optimization implementation

Implementation of pricing construct recommendations, usage, and sizing recommendations in liaison with platform engineering and SRE teams.
Working with business application owners in implementation of deployment and architecture specific recommendations

Challenges & Solutions

The cloud cost apportionment to individual portfolios or applications is complex due many services from the cloud provider being used across the portfolio in a shared manner.

The Infosys Cobalt repository has massive collection of assets to help define the cost allocation model for shared services, considering various parameters like effective usage contribution, effective value realization, and more.

Business and application owners do not get timely access to their consumption data and hence, are not able to act in proactive manner.

The Infosys solution fully automates the cost allocation dashboard with near real-time data on the cloud resource usage and faster access to the allocation report once the bills are generated by the cloud provider.

Cloud platform team is not able effectively control the cloud consumption in the enterprise.

Infosys establishes the right operating model for Cloud FinOps with associated process, tools and governance to ensure that cloud cost optimization is not just cloud platform team responsibility, but more a collaborative effort across teams facilitated by the Cloud FinOps team.