The Future of FinOps Needs CloudOps

For over a decade organizations have rapidly embraced the adoption of cloud infrastructure, but that embrace brought on a new set of economic challenges. As the years have passed, we have gotten smarter on cloud economics and are aware of FinOps. However, as organizations get a grasp on their cloud infrastructure and spend, more technological advances are made, forcing us to adapt our processes and mindset.

It’s the cloud; of course it’s going to evolve. But staying ahead of these changes as modernization and growth takes place presents a real challenge. As a former practitioner, I know that rapid changes exacerbate many of the challenges we all experienced when “FinOps” was still a new term and practice. With AI exploration, new product offerings, and a bigger, more expansive multicloud and SaaS footprint, many organizations are finding themselves in a bit of a reset stage back to the early days of cloud adoption when cloud costs were out of control.

I have spent most of my career within the FinOps space (even before it was commonplace as an organizational function.) I’ve witnessed the pivotal role it plays in increasing the value of the cloud and building a culture of cost awareness. I’ve also seen the challenges that come with M&A activity, exploring new technologies, or simply trying to maximize margins during a difficult post-pandemic market. When I think back to the biggest challenges I had as a practitioner and the challenges I hear across the industry today, it’s clear to me we are at an inflection point in the FinOps industry where organizations need to approach FinOps more proactively. To accomplish this, it will result in a melding of FinOps and CloudOps responsibilities into a unified team.

Why CloudOps is Critical to FinOps Success

When people think about FinOps, they often simplify it as a way of better managing the cost of the cloud. When in reality, the definition of FinOps is about maximizing the value of the cloud. A lot of processes and factors go into how efficient, expensive or secure an organization’s cloud footprint is, and all of those factors make up value in their own way.

Since a CloudOps team is uniquely at the center of all things cloud infrastructure—typically focused on delivery, performance and optimization—I believe their positioning and skillset is currently being underutilized. While traditional FinOps teams play a key role in fostering a cost-aware culture and creating accountability, the future success of FinOps practices hinges upon the contribution of CloudOps teams. 

There are three primary reasons CloudOps is pivotal to long-term FinOps success:

1. CloudOps teams specialize in automation, an area of focus in the Operate phase of FinOps. CloudOps teams typically have more technical expertise and should be relied on to build out more technical automation into FinOps processes. 
2. By leveraging this automation on processes such as account provisioning, tagging and other one-off remediation tasks, organizations begin to shift toward proactive governance and less reactive optimization. This results in preventing waste and risk before it exists, reducing spend and creating more time for value-add efforts.
3. By melding FinOps into CloudOps responsibilities, organizations can begin to unlock value from the cloud by managing identity, compliance and spend together. By ensuring there is proper access to accounts, guardrails are in place for organizational policies, and spend has proper governance, organizations will see a new level of “value” unlocked, elevating their traditional FinOps practice by managing all facets of infrastructure together.

The Future of FinOps in Action

I hope the “why” and value created from CloudOps involvement is clear. However, I am aware a good theory is only valuable if it can be put into practice. Let’s talk about the specifics of how to properly leverage CloudOps into processes to make FinOps more effective and your cloud infrastructure more valuable.

1. It starts with a governance strategy, created collaboratively across the IT organization. This is the critical first step, as it enables the guardrails and automation required for successful implementation. Here are some examples of items that need to be clearly defined at this stage:
   1. Tagging – expected keys and accepted values
   2. Account baselines – roles, resources and policies all accounts need at creation
   3. Least privilege roles – the minimum access required to start development
   4. Account structure – the way accounts will be viewed and managed (Example: By business unit, like developers vs. product)
2. With the high-level strategy documented, organizations can now maximize their CloudOps teams starting with the account provisioning process. CloudOps teams can build or leverage tools to create automation for account creation. For some organizations, this process can take weeks, but with automation in place, accounts can be provisioned in hours with least privilege access and baseline guardrails that meet the organization’s governance strategy. Below are some examples of what can (and should be) streamlined with proper automation:
   1. Tagging compliance – enforce tag key and values across accounts via notifications or automated actions to ultimately enhance chargeback processes and accountability
   2. Identity and Access Management – efficiently manage who in the organization has permission and ensure least privilege access to start
   3. Guardrails – protect your cloud and your budget by restricting certain resources, regions, etc. from being deployed (e.g. restrict all usage to US-based regions automatically)
3. At this step, accounts are efficiently being provisioned with baseline guardrails, and organizations have already significantly improved their FinOps practice by putting in more proactive optimizations to their processes. However, there is more value to gain. CloudOps teams should add financial policies to accounts to create automated alerting (or action) for cloud consumption. Some examples of financial policies:
   1. Weekend termination of resources in non-production accounts
   2. Alerting when spend is trending past budget
   3. Restricting expensive AI-based resources
   4. Automated clean-up for idle resources (as defined by the organizations governance strategy)

This example highlights a process CloudOps teams are uniquely positioned to own due to the nature of their role—automation and governance of cloud infrastructure—but it’s also highlighting the value of FinOps. The future of FinOps has to be more than forecasting, proper chargeback and purchasing commitment-based discounts. The future has to include more automation and governance to create proactive cost and process optimizations that generate long-term value and help prevent risk to both your security posture and budgets.

FinOps needs to be integrated within CloudOps processes for maximum success and overall business stability. As the cloud landscape becomes increasingly complicated, I fully believe the role of FinOps within an organization is critical for modern businesses that want to keep their fingers on the pulse of innovation and digital transformation.

By embracing FinOps as part of CloudOps, organizations can achieve not only cost savings, but a well-maintained cloud infrastructure that ensures efficiency, enables creativity, and eliminates risk.