The after-effects of the pandemic and the looming economic recession have brought businesses into a volatile economic environment. But the downturn is also an opportunity to optimize operations and accelerate growth.

Enterprising leaders can cut costs and complexities by evaluating their business operations. Focusing on high-value core competencies maintains performance, while increased efficiency and savings produce resources to invest in long-term growth.

There are many points where businesses can leverage IT optimization to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and maintain momentum. We’ve compiled our recommendations over 6 operational areas.

Wavestone

Our team is a blend of high-quality talent from all levels who can tackle your most complex issues with a fresh approach. With a globally connected network of 4,000 employees, Wavestone is designed to help you get results. All our consultants thrive on complex challenges, enjoy blazing new trails, and are committed to your organization’s success.

Successfully managing cloud costs requires a role and culture combining finance and operations. With the organizations we’ve worked with, we recognize that establishing a Cloud Center of Excellence is one of the keys to a successful FinOps organization. This defines pricing models, promotes communication and the sharing of best practices, organizes governance, produces reports, defines roles and responsibilities, and implements tools.

Driving optimizations by identifying FinOps roles and processes

The FinOps Manager is a hybrid role spanning a financial manager and a cloud architect that is responsible for the implementation, smooth running, and governance of cloud operations. For FinOps to be effective, the FinOps Community, led by the FinOps Manager, needs access to crucial information, like consumption data and associated costs.

At an application level, it is the job of the IT teams to:

  • Monitor consumption and cost
  • Detect unusual increases
  • Execute optimizations
  • Design with FinOps in mind
  • Collaborate and contribute to the wider FinOps community

Historically, cost management was the business of a few and is now the business of all. Accurate, efficient reporting will fuel the FinOps teams’ motivation, making data access to all parties essential.

With a formalized structure and strategy, you can focus on deploying FinOps best practices. These can be viewed in a 3-stage lifecycle:

Key Takeaways

By creating a unified cycle of financial, business, and architectural processes, FinOps can optimize cloud value. Your investment in FinOps can sometimes be difficult to quantify as the costs saved are dispersed across the organization.

Immediate, large savings occur in more immature environments and then flatten out over time because they are processed through continuous improvement. In the long run, from a “FinOps by design” perspective, FinOps’ benefits will no longer be quantifiable in the form of cost reduction but rather in the more abstract form of the level of adoption of best practices.

From our experience in delivering FinOps engagements, we have observed that all clients have achieved their ROI in less than 1 year. Across your cloud bill, it is reasonable to expect optimization of around 10%. Our experience shows that deploying effective and mature FinOps practices can reduce cloud expenditure by 20 to 30% in the long run.

Let us help you optimize your FinOps strategy.

Have a question? Just Ask.


Whether you're looking for practical advice or just plain curious, our experienced principals are here to help. Check back weekly as we publish the most interesting questions and answers right here.

ASK WAVESTONE

Related Insights