FinOps is a cultural practice to analyze the financial performance of multicloud infrastructure investments vs. actual spending. This practice provides visibility of cost savings, improves budget adherence, aligns cloud spend with business objectives, and offers ROI on multicloud infrastructure. It promotes shared responsibility for cloud costs across IT, DevOps, and other cross-functional teams to improve decision-making processes and drive greater business value.
Multicloud computing is a top operating expense (OpEx) for an increasing number of organizations—which means it’s essential for them to implement FinOps. With FinOps, organizations can gain a thorough understanding of their cloud computing costs to optimize those costs, boost profits, and gain a competitive edge.
However, organizations are facing challenges ensuring technology experts make decisions based on cloud spending, dealing with shared costs and accurate forecasting, reducing overallocation, and utilizing the full allocation of costs.
HPE Services addresses this challenge for organizations by aligning cloud spending with business objectives, defining standard disciplines, and fostering a culture of best practices across various business units such as engineering, operations, and sales. HPE Services enables cross-functional teams to work harmoniously, thereby gaining greater financial control and predictability, reducing friction, and accelerating product delivery. This is achieved through a centralized portal that provides data-driven insights, empowering businesses to make informed decisions.
Introducing FinOps into an organization is not just about deploying a FinOps tool; it is an organizational transformation that requires advisory and professional services expertise in FinOps. Transformations don’t happen overnight and typically take time to implement and mature. HPE Services structures this journey into three main phases:
- Visibility: This phase is predominantly about cost and usage data management, getting all the relevant data from all the different environments and making it available to all interested parties.
- Accountability: The next phase is very much about establishing financial control of cloud cost, linking cost data to internal accounting, or external invoicing, as well as budgeting.
- Efficiency: Visibility and accountability are the foundation for FinOps. On top of this foundation, organizational best practices and cost optimizations further continually improve the efficiency of a FinOps practice.
The phasing approach of HPE Services differs from the FinOps Foundation Framework, which comprises the phases inform, optimize, and operate. The model illustrated in Figure 2 is designed to represent an entire organization’s progression in FinOps transformation, whereas the FinOps Foundation phases are applied to individual FinOps capabilities, such as data ingestion. The FinOps solutions of HPE Services, guided by our advisory experts, deliver the full capacity of FinOps while aligning with the FinOps Foundation Framework.
Figure 2. Organization progress in FinOps transformation
Visibility
- Provides full financial control—Single pane of glass view
- Environment-agnostic—On-premises and public cloud
- Empowers transparency—Customizable reports
Accountability
- Makes money—Flexible pricing models
- Increases accountability—Chargeback
- Enables service providers—Invoicing
Efficiency
- Manages sensitive data—Security
- Streamlines processes—Automation
- Acts a team player—Easy integration
HPE Services supports organizations in successfully adopting FinOps for multicloud infrastructure by following the process outlined in Figure 3:
Figure 3. Adaptation of FinOps for multicloud infrastructure
HPE Services can help organizations initiate their FinOps journey by gradually introducing cloud spending discipline and fostering a culture of financial responsibility within their business units. This approach encourages organizations to step out of their comfort zones, adopt new practices, and work collaboratively to meet their business objectives. Hewlett Packard Enterprise offers a range of solutions to support the achievement of FinOps goals:
HPE GreenLake cloud: The consumption-based model enables users to deploy infrastructure on-premises but still gets cloud-like benefits while keeping control of their data and costs. HPE has been at the forefront of this consumption-IT effort with its HPE GreenLake program. Read more at hpe.com/us/en/greenlake.html.
HPE Services: The portfolio offers consulting, implementation, and operational support services to help customers implement cloud spending discipline and cultural practices. HPE Services also offers financing options and flexible payment plans to help customers manage their IT expenses and optimize their budgets.
HPE Cloud Platform Services – Multicloud Management Adoption: A powerful self-service engine to provide enterprise agility, control, and efficiency. Quickly enable on-premises private clouds, centralize public cloud access, and orchestrate change with cost analytics, governance policy, and automation hooks to quickly create and consume on-premises private clouds from existing hypervisors.
HPE Transformation Services – FinOps Advisory: Our offerings for FinOps empower enterprises to significantly improve how they visualize and allocate cloud usage and billing, efficiently managing hybrid cloud estates and operating cloud at scale.
HPE Cloud Platform Services – AIOps Integration for OpsRamp Service: Our offerings for AIOps leverage AI and machine learning to enhance IT operations, offering proactive insights, automation, and optimization for network performance, security, and application management, ultimately improving efficiency and reducing manual tasks. Read more at hpe.com/us/en/what-is/aiops.html.
HPE IT Sustainability Services – Advisory Workshop: HPE Sustainability Insight Center provides energy and carbon emissions reporting through a unified console to empower customers to make impactful changes, lower costs, and achieve their IT sustainable goals. For more information, see the HPE Sustainability Insight Center solution overview.
HPE Cybersecurity Services – Data Security Integration for Multicloud Management Adoption: HPE offers a range of cybersecurity services, including managed security, backup and recovery, and security consulting, to help organizations strengthen their defenses and protect their data against evolving threats. For more information, see the HPE Cybersecurity Services service brief.
HPE Services enable customers to embark on their FinOps journey while aligning with their business goals. By fostering discipline and cultural practices, organizations can hold their business units accountable for cloud spending. Whether customers are at the beginning of their FinOps journey or are already progressing toward their objectives, HPE provides the support needed to enhance financial operations in the cloud.
Learn more at HPE Cloud Platform Services – Multicloud Management Adoption service brief
Meet HPE Blogger Jeeva Selvaraj - Global lead for the cloud service management practice at HPE Services
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