When organizations begin making the transition from on-premises IT infrastructure to public cloud, their financial IT operations change as fundamental

4 Reasons Your Cloud Operations Need a FinOps Team

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2021-07-23 13:30:06

When organizations begin making the transition from on-premises IT infrastructure to public cloud, their financial IT operations change as fundamentally as their infrastructure does.

The largest conceptual paradigm shift is that from large, infrequent capital outlays for IT infrastructure procurement to hourly operational expenses. In the former case, most organizations have a structured procurement process that requires various levels of approval before outlays can take place. By contrast, public cloud services are procured in real-time by individual technical teams within the organization, de facto eliminating much of the oversight provided by procurement procedures. Procurement de facto becomes federated to the consumers of the services.

In many organizations, these teams may be tasked with conforming to a budget, but services can and often are purchased in excess of the budgeted amounts. These overruns are incurred before remediation can take place — the direct opposite of what occurs in a capital expenditure environment with a structured procurement process. This federated procurement process and the natural complexity of public cloud billing can combine to pose significant challenges for organizations that have yet to establish a disciplined FinOps team. Here are some of the most common challenges we see.

The process of tracing costs to business units, products, or customers is often referred to as “chargeback.” The key to effective chargeback lies in applying the correct structure of billing accounts, folders, projects or labels to the cloud infrastructure. When these structures fail to line up with business units, it can be extremely difficult to accurately report financial results or to make business decisions based on the cloud cost data.

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