Recommendations

Going Beyond Early Wins

Recommendations

Beyond the Obvious Wins

Quick wins can give you some short-term relief, but here are a few recommendations for more lasting, organizational change.

Determine where you fit on the cloud cost continuum. According to Principal Consultant Kelly Soden for Stratascale Cloud & Innovative Solutions, cloud cost optimization discussions usually come in two camps. Each camp has different requirements:

Camp #1: “Help! Our cloud spend is out of control. We need to fix it ASAP!” Camp #1 looks for quick fixes to stem the short-term bleeding. Camp #1 is also open to hearing about getting started with Cloud Financial Management (CFM) principles to help them later.
Camp #2: “We’ve stopped the immediate bleeding but know we could still do better at cloud cost optimization.” Camp #2 seeks to mature their cloud governance, cost management processes, and controls.

Consider people, process, and culture. Cloud cost optimization is not just about technology. It’s also about shifting an organization’s people, process, and culture to embrace better cloud cost management. Some examples:

Seek better organizational (and executive!) buy-in about the importance of cloud cost optimization. To drive culture change, both Info-Tech Research Group and another report from CloudHealth suggest using gamification—competitions and/or prizes that reward teams for cloud cost savings
Incentivize cloud cost efficiency for development and business teams. For example, organizations can set cost targets for their workloads and measure against those targets
Implement a process earlier in the procurement/provisioning cycle that enforces a predefined cloud budget
Encourage better cost containment practices as part of a wider showback or chargeback program

Consider expanding the cost optimization discussion. Many organizations with workloads in the cloud also still have private cloud infrastructure. It may be beneficial to take a wider look here at ways you can cut other costs in your organization’s overall environment as well.

Recommendations (Continued)

POLL

Which of the two camps does your organization fall into in terms of cloud cost optimization?

Our cloud costs are seriously out of control!
We’ve made progress with cost optimization but can still do better.
We are pros at the latest practices surrounding FinOps, cloud cost optimization, and governance.
Don’t really know where we are with cloud cost optimization.

Striving toward Maturity

There may be other, hard work ahead for organizations who want to become not just proficient, but thrive, in their new cloud world dynamic.

Just as DevOps requires collaboration between development and operation teams, FinOps—the set of practices for leveraging the cloud cost efficiently—requires collaboration between IT, finance, and the business. Here’s some other good advice from the land of FinOps.

Seek greater maturity with FinOps and CFM. The emerging world of FinOps (also referred to as CFM) addresses much in the way of cloud governance frameworks, best practices, and processes to help organizations mature and achieve better cloud cost optimization. There’s plenty of help available to move you along the path toward better guardrails and cost optimization practices. The following table (see next page), adapted from Info-Tech, offers some good, high-level goals to help you progress along your FinOps journey, based on whether your company considers itself a Beginner, Intermediate, or Advanced organization.

Early FinOps Goals

Based on Organizational Maturity

Source: Adapted from Info-Tech Research Group

Recommendations (Continued)

More on Best Practices for Quick-Win Success

Admittedly, much of this report covers more of the tactical, quick fixes you can adopt right away to help lower your cloud spend needle for your next monthly bill.

But such tactical, quick fixes can still be difficult to implement unless they are used in conjunction with other best practices.

Until you do the on-going work to implement FinOps best practices, your organization’s efforts toward quick wins may still resemble more of a whack-a-mole endeavor: Fix one area only for other, cloud cost overruns to pop up elsewhere. Examples of a few, other FinOps best practices:

Use cloud resource tagging to help you determine which cloud resources belong to which associated workloads, projects, teams, or business groups. Remember that “unattributable” claim made at the start of this report? Tagging = Attribution. It can also lead to more effective showback/chargeback capabilities that tie organizational business groups and projects to current cloud spend.

Apply policies, rules, or scripts that could do things like:

Perform automated, on-going resource checks for discrepancies
Require the assignment of tags to new cloud resources, as part of the DevOps CI/CD workflow
Automatically remove unattached resources after a process is no longer needed