FinOps practitioners bridge business, IT and Finance teams by enabling evidence-based decisions in near-real time to help optimize cloud use and increase business value. They focus on establishing a FinOps culture and enabling stakeholder teams by demonstrating a working knowledge of the Principles and Capabilities of the FinOps Framework, a prescriptive model of actions and best practices.
Executives, such as a VP/Head of Infrastructure, Head of Cloud Center of Excellence, CTO, or CIO, focus on driving accountability and building transparency, ensuring teams are being efficient, and not exceeding budgets.
These participants are usually Business and Product Owner team members, such as a Director of Cloud Optimization, Cloud Analyst, or Business Operations Manager.
Engineers and Ops team members, such as Lead Software Engineers, Principal Systems Engineers, Cloud Architects, Service Delivery Managers, Engineering Managers, or Directors of Platform Engineering, focus on building and supporting services for the organization. Cost is introduced as a metric in the same way that other performance metrics are tracked and monitored. Members of these teams consider the efficient design and use of resources via activities like rightsizing (the process of resizing cloud resources to better match the workload requirements), allocating container costs, finding unused storage and compute, and identifying whether spending anomalies are expected.
Finance and procurement team members, including Technology Procurement Managers, Global Technology Procurement, Financial Planning and Analyst Managers, and Financial Business Advisors, use the reporting provided by the FinOps team for accounting and forecasting. They work closely with FinOps practitioners to understand historic billing data so that they can build increasingly accurate cost models. They use their forecasts and expertise from the FinOps team to engage in rate negotiations with cloud service providers.
When proposing the adoption of a FinOps function within an organization, there will be a need to brief a variety of personas among the executive team to gain approval, buy-in, and involvement in conducting FinOps and achieving its goals.
Each Executive team persona is described below, in terms of their goals, concerns, key messaging and useful KPIs. By understanding the motivations of each executive persona, a FinOps champion will be able to describe the value of FinOps more effectively, minimizing the time and effort to gain alignment. Please see the main Adopting FinOps section for more context.
FinOps Practitioner
Primary Goal Drive best practices into the organization through education, standardization, and cheerleading
Objectives
Cultural change flag bearer
Create cloud cost management best practices
Create benchmarks for teams to use
Create visibility and transparency to cloud cost
Create or inform cloud budgets and forecasts
Frustrations
Lack of access to needed data
Distributed accountability
Building adoption at enterprise scale
Tool reliance that does not deliver capabilities needed
Key Metrics
Accurate budgets
Accurate forecasts
Unit Cost Economics
Discount/Reservation coverage
Percentage untagged resources
Efficiency opportunity
FinOps Benefits
Centralized cloud cost management in single cloud or multi-cloud environment
Align accountability to cloud users
Build confidence around budgets and forecasts
Advance communication throughout the organization
CEO
Primary Goal Assurance that cloud investments are aligned with business objectives
Objectives
Accelerate Company Growth YoY
Strategic Competitive Advantage
Faster time-to-market
Deliver innovative, market leading solutions cost effectively
Frustrations
Unpredictable, sometimes chaotic, cloud spend
Unable to see link between engineering initiatives and business objectives
Unsure of the return on their company’s cloud investment
Key Metrics
Revenue Growth
Gross Margins
COGS (Cost of Goods Sold)
Unit Cost Economics
FinOps Benefits
Manage risk
Connect engineering decisions with business outcomes
Predict how cloud spend will grow as the business grows
Guide organization to make good cloud investments
CTO / CIO
Primary Goal Leverage technology to give the business a market and competitive advantage
Objectives
Accelerate Company Growth YoY
Strategic Competitive Advantage
Faster time-to-market
Deliver innovative, market leading solutions cost effectively
Frustrations
Extreme pressure to either justify or bring the cloud bill down
No guardrails on spend
Unsatisfied engineers
Business continuity
Reliability
Key Metrics
Revenue Growth
Gross Margins
COGS (Cost of Goods Sold)
Unit Cost Economics
Time to market for new features/product
Engineering productivity
Track R&D vs. Production spend
Maintain operations within budget
FinOps Benefits
Predict how cloud spend will grow as the business grows
Drive organization to make good cloud investments
Enable engineering organizations to gain more freedom to utilize newer cloud technologies and deliver solutions to market faster
CFO
Primary Goal
Objectives
Cost visibility and granularity, and accuracy
Overall cost-per-unit / COGS reduction
Managing costs during growth, disproportionate cost reduction during flat/declining periods
Frustrations
Unpredictable, sometimes chaotic, cloud spend
Unsure of the return on their company’s cloud investment
Cost fluctuations and innovation do not align to budgeting cycles
Key Metrics
Revenue Growth
Gross Margins
COGS (Cost of Goods Sold)
Unit Cost Economics
Predictability
FinOps Benefits
Increased accountability for cloud cost
Increased reliance on budget and forecast models
Direct impact on company bottom line
Product Owner
Primary Goal Quickly bring new products and features to market with an accurate price point.
Objectives
Accelerate Product Growth YoY
Increase time to market
Deliver innovative, market leading solutions cost effectively
Frustrations
Unpredictable, sometimes chaotic, cloud spend
Cannot predict the costs closely enough for new features and products resulting in pricing misses
Cannot predict how costs will change when launching existing products in new regions/markets
Key Metrics
Revenue Growth
Gross Margins
COGS (Cost of Goods Sold)
Unit Cost Economics - Cost per customer, Cost per product/feature
FinOps Benefits
Manage risk
Connect product decisions with business outcomes
Predict how much cloud infrastructure will factor into feature/ product price
Guide team to make good cloud investments
Engineering Lead
Primary Goal Deliver faster and high quality services to the organisation, whilst maintaining business as usual
Objectives
Unsatisfied engineers as their workload keeps rising.
Long delivery cycles
Cannot predict the impact on the budget
Difficult to identify service or application ownership
Cannot predict the costs closely enough for developing new features and products.
Frustrations
Drive accountability to engineering teams that are responsible for the application/services.
Provide guidance to engineering teams to have a cost-effective application/service by identifying anomalies and best practices.
Work together with engineering teams to identify rate reductions and possible cost avoidance
Cost allocation
Key Metrics
Revenue by infrastructure costs
Cost per deployed service & service utilisation rates
Showback & Chargeback of IT costs to the business
FinOps Benefits
Increased visibility to cloud cost
Connection to cloud cost and unit economics
More accountability for utilization
Incentive towards solid architecture principles to factor efficiency
IT Finance Manager
Primary Goal Accurately budget, forecast and report cloud costs
Objectives
Cost out and budget maintenance
Prepare accurate forecasts
Report actual costs and trends
Normalize spend predictability
Frustrations
Unpredictable, sometimes chaotic, cloud spend
Frustrated team as cloud cost accountability is distributed
Challenges with legacy finance models (cap-ex vs op-ex)
Key Metrics
Revenue Growth
Gross Margins
COGS (Cost of Goods Sold)
Unit Cost Economics
Budget and forecast transparency and accuracy
Policy compliance
FinOps Benefits
Identify unallocated spend
Facilitate showback/chargebacks to increase financial accountability
Cost or IT Spend per Vendor to provide possible consolidation opportunities
FinOps Benefits
Obtain the best cloud cost rates available
Translate billing data to activity based costing
Provide visibility and enable understanding of cost per technology license and contracts
FinOps Team Structures
The above diagram demonstrates how, for organizations operating on the FinOps model, a cross-functional team known as a Cloud Cost Center of Excellence (CCoE) interacts with the rest of the business to manage the cloud strategy, governance, and best practices that the rest of the organization can leverage to transform the business using the cloud.
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