In the last couple of years, more and more organizations are adopting Azure public cloud. These organisations are either born in the cloud, transform or rearchitect legacy applications, or migrate workloads due to end-of-life deprecated capex investments.

Cloud is inherently self-service, on-demand and based on a variable consumption model. As such adopting cloud changed the dynamic in organisations' purchase of IT services. Where developers and engineers used to be requesters for IT services working within certain boundaries defined by IT operational teams and procurement cycles through financial approval flows. They now spend company money dynamically through code with less visibility, predictability, more experimentation, and waste as a result.

As a cloud service provider, we encounter a lot of organisations who struggle to cope with the self-service nature and variable consumption model of the cloud. Organisations' product, application and engineering teams are the driving forces for incurring cloud expenditure, but they do not necessarily consider cloud expenditure as an efficiency metric. The most common issues with regard to cloud financials we come across are monthly cloud bills that increase month over month without proper insight into who is responsible or accountable for the increase in cloud expenditure, difficulties in forecasting cloud expenditure for the foreseeable future, inefficient use of platform consumption models, resource waste, lack of efficient reporting and cost anomaly detection.

This new reality has surged the need for a discipline that helps IT operation and finance teams to manage public cloud expenditure collaboratively, trying to achieve maximum value out of cloud technology investments and aligned to business strategic goals, collectively named Cloud Financial Management or FinOps. FinOps principles and best practices provide a framework which brings accountability and predictability to the highly variable, self-service, consumption-based billing models of public cloud.

The FinOps framework encompasses a large set of capabilities divided across multiple domains from which we created a practical approach tailored to the Azure public cloud platform. Our main goal is to assist our customers in regaining control of their organizations cloud expenditure behavior by creating more insight and predictability into their monthly invoices independent of the organisations' cloud maturity.

Our approach is an integral part of our Cloud Custodian services and encompasses workshops, cost assessments and operational advisory services.

In our cloud financial management workshop, we guide our customers through the FinOps framework, define concrete actions and best practices for FinOps capabilities and depending on the maturity level of the customer, define a minimum viable product and/or a roadmap based on scale, scope, and complexity. The output of the workshop is defined in a tangible and practical approach based on customer needs and business value creation.

Through our Azure cost assessment, we perform an analysis of the customer application environments and resource consumption on the Azure public cloud platform from a cost optimisation perspective. An in-depth analysis on resource sizing, consumption and usage will be performed and in turn, this will be fueling a set of recommendations which are validated together with customer's application owners to warrant applicability.

FinOps is a continuous iterative lifecycle approach. To assist our customers' operational teams in handling growth, managing change and supporting cloud demands, we have defined a set of continuous advisory services, based on our large customer experience, and incorporated them into our Cloud Custodian Advisory services. They are based on managed native controls and through our role as a trusted advisor.

The end goal of our FinOps services has a clear focus on assisting our customers with business value creation and helping them evolve to an organization reaping the financial benefits of the Azure public cloud platform's core capabilities in the form of flexible, on-demand, scalable and cost-effective application environments.

Are you interested in a cloud financial management workshop? Contact us here!