FinOps can often feel like walking a tightrope; you need to maintain a delicate balance between cost, quality, and capability if you’re to make the journey a success. With rising cloud costs threatening to throw you off course, however, there are more than a few challenges to your balancing act.
As a reminder, FinOps is the combination of Finance and DevOps, and involves a set of principles, personas and phases to create a fully collaborative space across teams. It can help you track cloud spending, identify wastage and allocate resources across various teams amongst many other benefits. However, you may face some challenges along the way. Let’s take a look.
Challenge #1: Not Enough Visibility
Arguably the biggest challenge when it comes to ensuring FinOps success is the obscured view into your cloud infrastructure. Without visibility, it’s easy for the cloud to sprawl, while also becoming seemingly impossible to understand where costs are being wasted and resources aren’t being optimised. In short, it defeats the entire purpose of any FinOps activity.
Overcoming the Challenge
Following the first of the three-phase ‘Inform, Optimise, Operate’ aspect of the FinOps Framework is a great place to start. The initial ‘Inform’ stage is heavily focused on visibility, driving you to establish the widest possible view of your setup via a thorough review of cloud data, usage, and sprawl. It sheds light in all the shadowy corners of your cloud.
Challenge #2: Inaccurate Data
Without visibility, there can be no accuracy…but likewise, there’s no visibility without accurate data to draw from. This brings us to the second, more insidious challenge standing between you and a FinOps triumph. With inaccurate data costing businesses up to 15% of their revenue, ensuring data is of high accuracy is crucial to maximising costs and minimising potential security risks. Elsewhere, messy processes, poor tagging practices, and low accountability can result in mass mis-reporting – undermining the efforts to create visibility.
Overcoming the Challenge
Much like the challenges they solve, visibility and tagging go hand-in-hand. A clear, consistent tagging process contextualizes where spend is occurring – and where it can be optimized. In addition, tagging enables accurate billing allocation between departments to support governance, supporting accuracy with accountability.
Challenge #3: Teams Aren’t Collaborating
For FinOps to work, collaboration is key; different teams must work together to share ideas, insights, and strategies with one another if they’re to drive activity forward. Departments must also take ownership of their cloud usage to ensure optimal cross-functional efficiency and drive accountability. Throwing an unrefined hybrid work setup into the mix, however, can sometimes undermine the collaborative nature of FinOps.
Hybrid teams can, for example, be impacted by differing device capabilities, poor call quality, and even inconsistent internet connections – all of which need to be tackled in order to empower collaborative efforts.
Overcoming the Challenge
By closely monitoring resource usage across your company’s teams and establishing a clear tagging process, you can overcome the challenge of visibility and move towards cost-saving opportunities. Prioritising tagging not only enhances visibility but also improves the accuracy of data, leading to more informed analytics.
In terms of the hybrid work environment, fostering a sense of long-distance connection between key FinOps stakeholders is crucial, so device, call, and internet capabilities need to be reviewed and refined.
How Surveil Can Help
The Surveil platform has been developed to align with the FinOps principles and personas, allowing for a more efficient approach to optimizing the cloud estate.
By providing cloud cost allocation, budgets, saving tracker views, and much more – all underpinned with our Smart Tagging engine – Surveil is able to provide an impactful, intelligent, persona-based FinOps experience, underpinned by visibility, accountability, and easy-to-understand analytics.
Surveil’s ready to help balance your FinOps journey, guiding you across the tightrope and on to FinOps success.
Want to hear more about FinOps? Head over to the FinOps Foundation website, or contact us to get started on your cloud optimization journey.
