By Levi Bissell, Edge-to-Cloud Transformation Strategist and FinOps Lead, HPE Services
However, new challenges in managing costs and optimizing resource utilization across these new diverse environments come alongside the adoption of distributed, variable, and consumption-based models. FinOps is a crucial methodology for empowering organizations to gain visibility, control, and efficiency across their IT footprint and finally get their arms around their cloud spend.
FinOps adoption entails a fundamental shift in an organization’s operating model and culture as it evolves new capabilities. Maturing into a FinOps model takes time and an immense amount of effort to navigate. which is why controlling spend remains the top cloud IT initiative for the eighth consecutive year, according to the Flexera State of the Cloud Report 2024.
Here are three keys to keep in mind no matter where you are in your FinOps adoption journey:
1. Balance
Like any successful organizational transformation, FinOps adoption involves more than just implementing a tool; it requires a balanced approach that includes people, process, and technology elements. An HPE client encapsulated this concept saying, “Tooling is to FinOps like a telescope is to astronomy."
What they meant by this was that going out and buying a cost management tool won’t solve your cost concerns in the same way that buying an expensive telescope won’t make you NASA. Purchasing a telescope doesn’t mean you’ll inherently know where to point it, how to focus it, or what you’re looking at when you put your eye up to the lens. Similarly, buying a cost reporting tool won’t do much unless you’ve developed a mature FinOps culture around it and your organization knows how to use that tooling to drive better outcomes. HPE’s FinOps transformation services will help you establish a strategy and strike the appropriate balance of capability development to realize your objectives.
2. Consistency
Many FinOps conversations may start within the context of a single public cloud environment because of the challenges associated with controlling the variable consumption models inherent in those platforms. However, most organizations today are leveraging a hybrid approach with significant portions of their IT spend still going to non-cloud endpoints, which means that limiting your initiative to the public cloud is also limiting the maximum efficiency to be gained from your FinOps adoption.
The core FinOps principles are platform agnostic and should be applied to all of your IT estate. However, this increased scale will add complexity to your operations. The best way to mitigate that is by designing for consistency and enforcing adherence across all environments. Having a single overarching strategy, cross-compatible naming and tagging conventions, a unified allocation model, and centralized reporting capability across your entire IT footprint helps ensure transparency and control regardless of where resources are deployed.
Consistency across platforms also means that it is easier to optimize usage between platforms and make informed decisions to maximize the overall return on investment from IT spending. HPE’s FinOps management services are designed to implement and operate monitoring and reporting technologies that span all of your environments giving you the complete picture that your organization needs to achieve its goals.
3. Observability
One of the core tenets of FinOps is to enable better data-driven spending decisions across the organization. Giving people the right information at the right time allows them to make decisions best suited to meet the stated goals of the organization. In the multi-cloud, variable-consumption world many organizations operate in, knowing exactly what resources are in an IT environment at a given time, who is using them, and how much they cost is more complicated than ever. Building a robust observability capability is critical to getting teams the information they need to make better decisions.
This starts by having consistent and robust IT asset management (ITAM) capabilities, a comprehensive naming and tagging standard, and a unified cost model for mapping out the direct and indirect costs existing in the IT landscape. In turn, this elevated level of observability into the IT ecosystem enables showback (the process of allocating IT resource consumption to a specific group or user and providing them with a report on that consumption) and chargeback (internally cross charging a specific group or user for their allocated IT resource consumption).
Showback and chargeback provide a new level of visibility to teams, leading to more proactive cost governance action while also fostering a culture of accountability. Enhanced observability is also a prerequisite for modern resource- and budget-monitoring capabilities which allow teams to track and analyze consumption data in real time. To establish this fundamental capability, HPE has a suite of state-of-the-art observability tools and services that will give your teams the cross-platform visibility they need to optimally manage your IT estate.
No matter where you are in your FinOps journey, or what combination of IT platforms your organization is leveraging, taking a balanced approach that is consistently applied across all of your environments and is underpinned by a robust observability capability will serve you well. In every industry, FinOps adoption is increasingly important.
Advisory and Professional Services from HPE can help to define the best strategy, design and delivery of FinOps management platform through HPE MultiCloud Management Adoption Service – Integration with FinOps. HPE Services can accelerate the adoption of these technologies and customize them accordingly to your business needs.
Learn more about HPE Services
Levi Bissell is a FinOps transformation leader in HPE’s Services group. He is a seasoned technology and business leader with a proven track record of tackling some of the most complex hybrid cloud challenges. In addition to helping guide enterprises through their digital transformation journeys, Levi focuses on leveraging his innovative spirit and thought leadership to expand the boundaries of the emerging hybrid FinOps world.
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