FinOps and Governance
The Challenge
Cloud enables immense agility but creates a new need to govern spend in a way that adds organisational value and meets the needs of stakeholders across the business
Many organisations have roles, tools, and processes that are designed to deal with traditional IT infrastructure purchasing. The spend for traditional IT infra. tends to be significant, static, predictable, paid-upfront, CapEx heavy, and heavily negotiable. This makes supply-side Finance/Procurement controls highly impactful.
Cloud IT spend has the opposite attributes. Spend decisions tend to be small, dynamic, unpredictable, paid monthly as a utility, OpEx heavy, and has public pricing and less negotiable. This makes traditional supply side controls and monthly/quarterly/annual budget cycles ineffective at managing spend.
New roles, tools, processes, controls, and governance is required to maintain the agility benefits of cloud whilst meeting the needs of Executives, Finance, Procurement, Business teams, and Engineering.
The Solution
Goldiserv can help you design a FinOps governance framework that works for you
Having worked across Government, Commercial, Startup and Enterprise – we believe using a standard one-size-fits-all framework is not the best approach to address your cloud governance challenge. In order to create a strategically fit and practical FinOps governance framework we typically take the following steps:
- Understand the priority of cloud cost efficiency, spending to budget, etc. vs. other business objectives
- Understand current environment in terms of existing process, tools, skills, and resourcing
- Agree with the customer the current status of governance across ~10 FinOps maturity dimensions
- Agree a realistic maturity target to achieve by end of year
- Socialise and gain buy-in for proposed plan through a short business case
- Execute on the plan and iterate as feedback is gathered
The governance framework can be treated as a 3-year plan. Target outcomes and activities in year 1 may include:
- Executives, Finance, and Engineering to have access to commercial insight within 1 minute through role-relevant cloud commercial dashboards
- 80% of Engineers to undertake and pass cloud commercial training program
Customer Impact
One Enterprise Telco customer has the following to say:
“a game changer for our Finance and IT teams … has enabled better conversations with IT executives demonstrating that Finance understand their specific business challenges in a greater depth to have meaningful conversations and provide sound financial advice.
The partnering that you have provided has been instrumental to instilling the right focus and practices across our organisation and embedding a true FinOps culture.”
In another engagement, we received a thank you letter from the customer’s VP of Engineering.
And in a third customer, they gained net-new ability to spend within plus-minus 5% of forecast.
