FinOps Capabilities

Cost Allocation is the set of practices to divide up a consolidated invoice or bill among those who are responsible for its various component parts.

Data analysis and showback is the ability to create a near real-time reporting mechanism which calls to attention total costs for the desired business entity, opportunities for cost avoidance, and KPIs.

Anomaly Management is the ability to detect, identify, clarify, alert, and manage unexpected or unforecasted cloud cost events in a timely manner.

Learn how to appropriately split cloud costs that are shared and build a complete picture of how your organization uses various cloud costs across its products, departments, and teams.

Understand forecasting cloud costs – how future cloud infrastructure and application lifecycle changes may impact current budgets and influence budget planning and future cloud investment decisions.

Budgeting for Cloud is a process of collecting estimated expenses for a specific period of time. Decisions on how to operate as a business, what to invest in and other strategic decisions are made based on budgets.

Workload Management & Automation focuses on running resources only when they are needed, and creating the mechanisms to automatically adjust what resources are running at any given time.

Spend-based commitment discounts and resource-based commitment discounts are the most popular rate optimizations that cloud service providers offer. Learn how to navigate CSP native tooling and FinOps platforms to better plan, manage, and benefit from these types of discount constructs.

Optimizing resource utilization and efficiency is about making sure you are getting sufficient business value for every cloud cost. Practitioners can do this by creating the means of collecting and viewing cost and usage over time, and by building both manual and automated policies to help teams optimize how they use cloud services across the infrastructure.

Cloud unit economic metrics enable you to determine the revenue you’ll gain from a single unit of your business and the cost associated with servicing it, revealing the business value of your cloud spend.

Data ingestion and normalization in the context of FinOps represents the set of functional activities involved with processing and transforming data sets that inform cloud cost and usage.

Chargeback and Finance Integration is about pushing spend accountability to the edges of the organization that are responsible for creating the expense.

This capability is about establishing a cloud “front door” process to onboard brownfield and greenfield applications through financial viability and technical feasibility assessment criteria, all while setting up FinOps best practices from the start.

Guidance on creating a movement to establish cultures of accountability so organizations understand that the practice of cloud cost management is about leveraging FinOps to accelerate the creation of business value.

This capability examines the intersection between FinOps with other standards. Widespread use of public cloud creates new challenges for traditional processes and the intention for this capability is to provide a place to capture FinOps’ interactions with existing IT and financial standards being used by your organization.

Policy and Governance can be thought of as a set of statements of intent, with associated assurances of adherence.

FinOps Education & Enablement allows all those participating in FinOps practices to increase the business value of cloud by accelerating FinOps adoption and training.

Learn how to define an organization’s FinOps-related roles, responsibilities, and activities to bridge operational cloud cost management gaps between teams. It oulines the people, processes and decision trees needed to tackle unexpected challenges, in addition to having them be proactively available when an organization needs to take action ahead of time.