Unlock Cloud Potential with Tailored FinOps Solutions.

Cloud Financial Operations (FinOps), a methodology that merges financial management and cloud operations, plays a crucial role in minimizing cloud costs and maximizing resource efficiency. This practice, a rising trend in the cloud computing domain, has been a recurrent topic on this blog, particularly for its prowess in cost containment.

Nonetheless, finops does more than just curtail costs; it also sheds light on suboptimal cloud architecture practices resulting in detrimental deployments. By scrutinizing cloud cost data and trends, finops teams can pinpoint trouble spots and necessary fixes. Can this insight be harnessed to enhance cloud deployments? There are several aspects to contemplate.

Cost Evaluation and Refinement

Finops teams can access granular cloud cost data, allowing them to dissect spending trends and identify suboptimal cloud architecture practices that lead to unnecessary expenditure and resource underutilization.

Common pitfalls include over-allocating resources, neglecting automation, inefficient container management, or incorrect use of reserved instances. Often, these mistakes, made in the past, take years to rectify and may have already inflicted irreparable harm to the business.

Finops monitoring systems can examine cost data and identify specific resources or services that are inflating expenses. This usually paves the way for potential architectural enhancements and substantial cost reductions.

Performance and Scalability Assessment

Finops teams can assess the performance and scalability of cloud infrastructure by monitoring key performance indicators such as response times, latency, and throughput. This helps in identifying bottlenecks or areas where the existing architecture hinders scalability and performance.

Since finops typically tracks expenses, it can precisely quantify the financial toll of architectural mishaps. It is not uncommon to discover that a cloud-based system incurs monthly costs that are tenfold higher than necessary. Such revelations are startling for most businesses, as those funds could have been redirected towards innovation.

Some finops systems can compute the net losses incurred due to these architectural blunders. In many instances, it is even possible to quantify the resultant decline in business value. For example, exclusively relying on a single public cloud provider without evaluating others that might offer superior solutions, such as a database that performs five times faster and benefits around 50 applications. This superior database could have reduced costs by a third, quintupled performance, and yielded $15 million annually in productivity gains. Worse still, that $15 million could have been invested in developing a new product line, potentially generating $100 million in revenue. Although this scenario may seem exaggerated, similar situations have surfaced during cloud architecture analyses, revealing overlooked opportunities and inefficiencies. This is more prevalent than many acknowledge.

Damage Mitigation

Now, let's address a question that most cloud professionals prefer to evade: What if your cloud architecture harbors significant inefficiencies?

It is likely that most cloud deployments exhibit some level of inefficiency, so it is important to recognize the damage to allocate funds for remediation. It is advisable to categorize each issue into distinct domains that can be addressed individually and prioritize them based on the cost implications, from highest to lowest. Winning the war requires triumphing in numerous battles.

Typically, these involve tactical modifications such as redesigning databases, selecting appropriate technology, refining cloud deployment, and enhancing cloud operations planning. Although these are not simple tasks, the path to resolution is relatively straightforward.

However, there are more strategic missteps, such as exclusively using a single cloud provider (as illustrated earlier). This may have seemed prudent initially, perhaps due to relationships with board members or political reasons that restricted options. Regrettably, this results in substantial technical debt that could have been avoided.

It is important to remember that finops is not a panacea. While it excels at identifying areas for optimization, tracing these back to suboptimal architectural practices requires the expertise of adept cloud architects. In essence, finops is adept at detecting issues but does not specify the underlying causes or recommend solutions.

Our team of experienced professionals will work closely with you to develop a customized solution tailored to your unique needs. Through a collaborative approach, we will help you navigate the complexities of cloud architecture, identify inefficiencies, and implement strategic improvements to optimize your cloud operations and financial management.

To start your journey towards optimized cloud costs and improved operational efficiency, contact us today. Our dedicated experts are ready to provide guidance and support every step of the way.

Don’t let inefficiencies in your cloud architecture hinder your business’s potential. Reach out to us and let’s work together to unlock the full potential of your cloud operations.