When organizations deploy infrastructure in the cloud, they move from buying “things” to buying “proportions of usage of things over time.”i Their developers—many of whom can’t even buy stationery without a signed purchase order—can now provision multimillion-dollar run-rate environments with the call of an API.
Every organization either has reached or will reach a tipping point where an executive questions the spend on cloud infrastructure resources. For some organizations, that might be $20 million per year. For others it might be 200 million per year. Either way, eventually someone asks, “Why are we spending this much?”
Without a mature FinOps program, no one in the organization will be able to answer this question, and not being able to explain why the enterprise spent $200 million dollars could be embarrassing.
An effective FinOps program allows organizations to:
- Reduce cloud infrastructure costs by 30-70%, which could equate to millions or billions of dollars saved annually.
- Accurately charge back cloud infrastructure costs to the appropriate cost center or line of business.
- Report on the value created by spending on cloud infrastructure resources.
- Hold engineering teams and product teams accountable for running infrastructure in a cost-effective way.
- Enable the organization’s executive leadership to make informed decisions about trade-offs between speed, cost, and quality.
iStorment & Fuller 48.
