Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As a member of the FinOps organization, Anodot is excited to sponsor the upcoming FinOps X event in Austin, TX. Anodot’s mission has always been to help organizations solve one of the most recognized challenges associated with public cloud adoption — cost control and optimization. Every feature of our Anodot cloud cost management platform has been built by taking a core FinOps market concern and working backward to deliver a capability that fills that need.

Given the strategic importance of the cloud and size of cloud expenditures, it’s critical for enterprises to have solid controls in place to manage it all. According to our latest research, however, while most organizations agree with that sentiment, very few have put it into practice. There are distinct but related disciplines that come into play: FinOps and cloud governance. In this two-part series, we explore current state of each.

The FinOps position, for most SaaS companies, is a relatively recent addition to the team. FinOps acts as a liaison between the Finance and Engineering teams, with the goal of getting everyone on the same page (and speaking the same language) when it comes to setting, optimizing, and sticking to budgets. FinOps and engineering have a special relationship, because engineers are the ones who ultimately make major infrastructure, development, and design choices that impact the cloud bill.

While Financial Operations (FinOps) isn’t a new concept, it is becoming more prevalent in companies that have started seeing increases in their cloud spend. Historically, when engineers needed to set up infrastructure to complete a project, they had to go through a long process of procuring servers, finding space in a data center, and getting financial approval. This process could take two months or more, so it allowed plenty of time for oversight by the financial department.

Making better decisions doesn’t always require more data. Finding the right data and making sure the right people have it at the right time does. This is particularly important for companies that use the cloud. Using cloud financial planning solutions is an excellent way to automate, extend, and align goals with business outcomes in light of the cloud’s complexity. The solution can also help eliminate cumbersome, error-prone manual processes.

This is the fifth and final part of this FinOps series, The Operate Phase. If you have missed any of my previous blogs, here is a list of posts in the series: Note: I am ex-AWS, so you will notice a lot more focus on AWS tools and services as examples here, however we are cloud agnostic and all cloud providers have similar services and tools.

Companies migrate to the cloud to become more productive, respond to market changes, and be flexible — while spending less on cloud infrastructure. But there is one thing that many cloud-based organizations have learned: Cloud costs add up. Fast. As a result, 71% of cloud financial management teams doubt they will achieve expected results at the expected time or at all. Only 29% of cloud FinOps teams expect to achieve their cloud goals.