Think FinOps First for the Holidays
FinOps is commonly associated with the discipline of extracting the largest possible value from each dollar spent on the Cloud.
While this is accurate, I’ve found my view of FinOps shifting over my career. Instead of associating FinOps with “Cloud Value” or even “Cloud Ownership,” I started to associate FinOps with the word “First.” I’ll explain.
Unfortunately, the holidays fall near the end of most companies’ fiscal year. Too often, year-end is synonymous with “Spend Freeze.” We’ve all seen them; Critical travel only, all discretionary spend no longer approved, furlough all subcontractors until the new year, shift holiday parties from in-person gatherings to virtual engagements, no gifts – use e-greeting cards or inter-company points (so people can purchase some widget off a 3rd party website with points that translate at a rate of 500 to $1, ok maybe not that bad). Meanwhile, if you’re in FinOps, all these anti-spend initiatives most likely leave you wondering… why did they not check with FinOps First?
The opportunities available to any company with a Cloud footprint are extensive, yet some companies struggle to distinguish them.
Cloud is not new, yet business leaders are regularly caught off guard. Many austerity opportunities are all too often overlooked, despite their ability to drive immediate savings the day of implementation. Maybe even the hour. Certainly, proper assessment/risk analysis is required. I’m not suggesting rouge actions outside of proper change control. But I am suggesting action. Here are some things to consider:
Thinking FinOps First helps to prevent unnecessary business impact, like the knee-jerk reaction to reduce workforce prematurely. Savings from Cloud can be significant in value, and when done right, yields 12 months of savings (or more). Thinking FinOps First can mean keeping co-workers employed vs. costly replacement on the upturns.
Thinking FinOps First drives improved cash flow in the current period. Patience doesn’t need to be a virtue when it comes to realizing immediate savings.
Thinking FinOps first can creatively solve budget constraints by identifying ways to reclassify Cloud cost from Opex to Capex. This frees up budget to focus on critical operational business expenses.
Thinking FinOps first can challenge the way applications are built. Leverage the business case of Cloud scale with FinOps practices to scale down lower environments when not in use. Thinking FinOps First helps avoid the temptation to build oversized infrastructure in blind anticipation of future needs.
Thinking FinOps first forces companies to be proactive in how they handle and store large amounts of data in an unprecedented period of digital data growth.
Thinking FinOps first invites proactively concepting policies to automate and enforce behavior that aligns to the company objectives.
This not only reduces cost, but also helps applications run more efficiently. Thinking FinOps First should be the message that gets spread across all areas of the business. This way of thinking has more opportunities to alleviate cost constraints than all the bells and whistles on the latest line-down-the-block, must-have holiday gadget. If you can motivate your business to harness and empower the brain trust of engineering teams to creatively consider these opportunities, I assure that you’ll be amazed at the results they produce. Think FinOps first and commission your teams to unleash business value as we enter the holiday freeze! (Just get it done before the code freeze, of course 🤓).
Tools like Caliper can be incredible additions to almost any company’s Holiday wish list. With a price point so affordable (it can probably be expensed on your corporate card within most delegations), Caliper can provide fast, flexible views of Cloud spend displayed in compelling visualizations to help identify areas of opportunity at an unmatchable value. Give Caliper a shot. You will likely see a FinOps reward just 15 minutes after implementation.
