FinOps & ITAM examines the integrations required between FinOps and IT Asset Management (ITAM), including software asset management (SAM), and with the related but separate discipline of IT Service Management (ITSM) including configuration management.
IT Asset Management is a discipline used by organizations for lifecycle tracking and reporting on assets – hardware, software, software licenses, and other assets both tangible and intangible – used in the IT infrastructure to deliver value. Typically IT Asset management focuses costs (purchase, support), risks (ensuring that assets are used in accordance with regulatory and contractual requirements), and value/ROI of these assets for the organisation.
ITSM configuration management tracks configuration items (CIs) and their relationships to IT services. The scope of ITSM configuration management is primarily focused on asset configuration (settings, relationships, and groupings) during the use phase of the lifecycle. ITSM also focuses on ensuring that IT services and their components are tracked and manage to support the provision of high quality IT services to the organisation, from when they are procured or created until the time they are retired from use.
Both disciplines provide inventory information to allow organizations to satisfy security, legal, regulatory, financial and operational use cases where it is necessary to know what hardware, license, or software element existed, was used, was accessed, or was disposed of – a single pane of glass for all technology components in use within an organisation
Widespread use of public cloud creates new challenges for both ITAM and configuration management organizations in several regards:
Intersections between the FinOps team, ITSM configuration management and ITAM teams in an organization then will typically be complementary. ITAM teams will face challenges tracking virtual assets in the cloud without the help of FinOps functions to interpret the broad and detailed data. FinOps teams will face challenges meeting the comprehensive asset reporting requirements satisfied by existing and mature ITAM teams.
Not every organization maintains a mature IT Asset Management or configuration management organization and it is common for the two roles to be performed by a single team
IT Asset Management as a discipline is defined within the ISO 19770 family of standards and is maintained by working group 21 within ISO.
ITSM Configuration Management is defined within the ISO20000 family of standards.
written for each persona responsible for the functional activity and processes encapsulated by his Capability. each one should be associated generally to one of the FinOps Phases (Inform, Optimize, Operate). for example:
As a [FinOps Persona], I will [functional activity] so that [desired outcome] is achieved.
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Measures of success are represented in the context of cloud costs and may include one or more key performance indicators ( KPI ), describe objectives with key results ( OKR ), and declare thresholds defining outliers or acceptable variance from forecasted trends.
at least one measure of success; should be described in a context of cost; this could be an efficiency KPI or an agreed upon threshold or target.
for example:
- idle resource costs will not exceed 3% of total monthly cloud spend
- anomaly costs will not exceed $150/month
the information used that contributes to the measure(s) of success listed above; information here may include specific datasources, reports or any relevant input
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