FinOps in my company

What we call FinOps today emerged nearly a decade ago as an operational framework and cultural practice to maximize the business value derived from cloud computing technologies.

Of course, it wasn’t called FinOps at first. Many referred to activities in this area as cloud cost management, cloud optimization, cloud financial management, or similar terms. However, many companies have formalized this methodology within their processes, establishing dedicated FinOps functions. They call it the Cloud Business Office or FinOps Business Office, and the role of FinOps Manager is increasingly appearing in LinkedIn job postings and on the FinOps Foundation's site.

More Effective, More Democratic

FinOps is not just a way to manage cloud costs with financial accountability. It decentralizes financial decision-making about technology, reshaping how organizations plan for future technological capabilities and optimize existing ones. The main premise of FinOps is that traditional IT infrastructure management methods for the cloud are not only inefficient—they’re outdated. FinOps methods encourage IT, finance, and business experts to collaborate in new ways, adding another benefit to this approach.

To explain this in more detail: quarterly financial reports show what has already happened. During planning for the next period, organizations try to predict their future needs. This is feasible until an anomaly arises. In organizations running business processes in the cloud, unplanned and uncontrolled increases in operational costs frequently occur.

IT professionals will point out that these cost increases stem from the nature of cloud environments. Managing these environments involves far more parameters and variables than on-premises environments. In other words, managing the cloud is fundamentally different from managing the rest of the organization. More unknowns require stricter process control and a significantly better, more efficient interface for all those generating these costs.

Most Kyndryl customers who have adopted the cloud admit that FinOps is their greatest challenge. The democratization of access to infrastructure, its ease of establishment, and the entire process are so different from traditional IT management methods that IT managers feel unable to control costs or understand cloud service bills.

For instance, experiences from our clients in Poland and worldwide confirm that as cloud service usage increases, IT management in enterprises transforms. Although this evolution introduces new complexities, especially in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, it also offers the opportunity to enhance strategies and optimize operational efficiency, contributing to success.

A Catalyst for Competitiveness

For FinOps, the cloud is not merely a cost center—it is also an innovation lab and a decision-making catalyst that makes a company more competitive. When well-managed, the cloud provides companies with a bird’s-eye view and insights that can lead to better strategies—if the costs incurred in each process are tied to the business value they bring.

In a broader sense, FinOps improves collaboration and communication among distributed and functionally diverse teams. It introduces gradual changes based on well-analyzed data to optimize costs without significant compromises in speed, price, or quality of monitored processes.

FinOps is essentially a culture focused on the most efficient way to manage cloud costs. Through FinOps, everyone in an organization manages the costs of their cloud processes with greater financial and operational autonomy, coordinated by a central team responsible for best practices. Using the FinOps methodology, every team has access to the latest data and makes data-driven decisions, resulting in balanced costs and maximized service quality.

By investing wisely in cloud resources, organizations increase profits, expand their user base, create more products and services, and operate faster than their competitors. Ultimately, they can resign from their data centers entirely, moving all processing to the cloud.

Core Practices

Three practices are essential for effectively applying the FinOps methodology: timely reporting, activating processes only when needed, and effective team collaboration. Timely reporting (immediate feedback) is a powerful tool for real-time response. The faster and clearer you explain the consequences of engineers' actions, the quicker and more effectively they can adjust their behavior.

In modern business, the ability to directly view cloud environment usage enables companies to adjust planned actions and optimize consumption. Moreover, providing immediate access to necessary data creates a situation where no one needs to dictate what to do—the FinOps process itself leads to greater efficiency. There is less discussion about technical details and more about what is best for the business. At the same time, company size is irrelevant.

Choose a Better Scenario

Introducing FinOps is not a magic wand. It takes time to learn how to manage it effectively. There are two scenarios for implementing FinOps. One occurs when costs reach a point where you must stop and reassess what you’re doing with your cloud—this is the less favorable scenario. Gradually implementing FinOps, process by process, until the methodology scales across all cloud processes in the organization, is the more common and better approach. Finance professionals need time to learn the language of the cloud, and engineers need time to understand its financial concepts.

How Kyndryl Helped Its Clients

The first example is Ausgrid, Australia’s largest electricity distributor, serving 1.8 million customers and over 4 million people. The organization’s vision is to provide communities with access to resilient, affordable, and net-zero carbon energy. To realize this vision, Ausgrid decided to transform its IT systems to a hybrid cloud scenario. When unpredictable costs arose with this model, finding an experienced partner with practical cloud operations expertise became essential. Within six weeks, Kyndryl Consult and FinOps practitioners identified 1,264 cloud optimization opportunities and developed a transformation plan.

The second example is a large North American healthcare provider struggling to scale its server infrastructure up and down and correctly identify unused resources. This led to rising costs and operational inefficiencies. Kyndryl’s FinOps platform and services helped align server resources with business objectives and optimize costs.

These are just some examples of how Kyndryl can help optimize cloud expenditures and align them to achieve maximum business value. FinOps is not just a technical solution but also a cultural change that requires collaboration, transparency, and accountability across teams and stakeholders. Kyndryl has the expertise, tools, and best practices to guide you on this journey, enabling you to achieve your financial goals in the cloud.

Edyta Samborska