Growing need for optimizing cloud spend management as cloud adoption accelerates
Cloud adoption has been expanding since its inception and global Covid-19 situation further accelerated it as business responded to a new social and consumer dynamic. Gartner estimates that worldwide cloud market will grow to nearly 900 billion USD by 2025.
With this magnitude of cloud adoption, cost optimization takes the centre stage. According to Flexera's recently released 2022 State of the Cloud Report, based on survey responses from 753 global cloud decision-makers, estimated that their organizations waste 32% of cloud spend. Public cloud spend was over budget by an average of 13% for the previous year. Organizations expect their cloud spend to further increase by 29% in the next twelve months.
FinOps emerging as new essential pillar of cloud
To reduce the amount of waste and gain control over cloud costs, organizations are deploying different skillsets IT, operations, and FinOps to manage costs. FinOps is a discipline, a cultural change, a framework built on visibility, usage management, rate management, and shared ownership of cloud costs to maximize value of cloud.
Similar to DevOps, FinOps is a cultural practice. It provides a method for multiple teams in an organization to manage their overall cloud costs, where each department or business unit takes ownership of their cloud usage supported by a specialised FinOps internal or external team . Cross-functional teams in senior leader leadership, finance, engineering, etc work together to gain more financial control and predictability.
Using FinOps can help increase revenue, accelerate feature / product release velocity or even help remove CapEx investment completely from an organization’s ecosystem. FinOps removes blockers enables better decision making for investments, empowers operations and engineering teams.
FinOps plays a role right from initial stages of cloud journey:
How to get started?
Key to resolve cloud spend wastage challenge is FinOps and we at Coforge enable organizations of all sizes adopt the solution with our industry tested robust consultative 3-step framework.
Discovery and analysis – With identified key stakeholders we conduct workshops to understand pain points - such as cloud costs breaking business cases, general perception of cost overruns, lack of cost visibility by cloud consumers. Using specialized tools, we conduct an initial review of current state and cloud spend. Overall planning includes initial resourcing, suggesting initial KPIs, identification of tools requirements, communication plans, formulate an operating model, identify early-adopter candidates, identify threats, create reports, identify gaps with respect to best practices.
Communicate Value – To bring down cloud costs, a variety of stakeholders of an organization will be involved in giving approvals, that typically include leadership executives, finance, engineering and product owners. By effectively communicating and presenting the finding of analysis stage we can understand each persona’s motivations and gain alignment more effectively. At this stage we will share the summary of To-Be stage, a high-level FinOps road map, address key questions, refine and customize FinOps model.
Implement FinOps as part of operations – As a part of operations we on-board FinOps tools and methodologies that not only provide visibility but actionable insights and automated self-fixing abilities. This is backed and supported by Coforge’s FinOps team that helps bring recommendation to optimize spend, ensure compliance alignment, rebalancing recommendations, automation to start and stop idle and unused resources, best practices checks, change monitoring and several other benefits.
To read more about Coforge’s cloud services, please visit - https://www.coforge.com/services/cloud-and-infrastructure-management-services/cloud-services
Akhil has over 14 years of IT experience, an aficionado of cloud solutions. He’s currently a cloud solution specialist at Coforge helping medium to large-scale enterprises transform, modernize and innovate.
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About Coforge.
We are a global digital services and solutions provider, who leverage emerging technologies and deep domain expertise to deliver real-world business impact for our clients. A focus on very select industries, a detailed understanding of the underlying processes of those industries, and partnerships with leading platforms provide us with a distinct perspective. We lead with our product engineering approach and leverage Cloud, Data, Integration, and Automation technologies to transform client businesses into intelligent, high-growth enterprises. Our proprietary platforms power critical business processes across our core verticals. We are located in 23 countries with 30 delivery centers across nine countries.