By Deepak Mittal (Co-founder & CEO, TO THE NEW)

The era of digitalization has made the cloud ubiquitous in any organization’s technology stack. Along with enormous benefits like agility, scalability and reduced costs, it could pose particular challenges in maximizing returns from cloud investment.

The Rise Of FinOps Wave

Given the on-demand consumption-oriented financial model and variable prices, a unified approach is necessary for in-house teams to contribute to a company's cloud decision-making. FinOps brings financial accountability to the cloud's variable spend model and manages the overall cloud infrastructure with explicit focus, collaboration and high-value strategy.

The Need For A FinOps Partner

FinOps is a great way to navigate the trade-off between cloud performance, quality and costs. According to the 2022 Cloud Infrastructure Report, 100% of the companies working with an MSP said they benefit from that relationship.

The partnership with a FinOps vendor is beyond cost optimization or discounting options. It has now matured from a tactical relationship to a strategic partnership due to the following reasons:

  1. Save cost (money, time, and energy): Outsourcing to a FinOps vendor eliminates the cost associated with onboarding and training the team and the time required to mature their FinOps understanding.

     

  2. Much-needed expertise: FinOps partners offer a unique perspective and expertise, helping organizations confidently traverse their cloud journey.

     

  3. 24x7 active and reliable team: An outsourced FinOps partner has the bandwidth to provide round-the-clock assistance. They also take a proactive approach to maintenance by identifying and troubleshooting any potential problem before it becomes a severe issue.

     

  4. Better predictability to cloud costs: With FinOps, organizations can leverage better forecasting models, automated budgeting and advanced cloud spend monitoring tools. This will help better predict future requirements, rightsize cloud resources and get real-time notifications on spend thresholds to optimize their usage.

     

  5. Stay focused and compete in the marketplace: Business can be complex, and it is easy to underestimate its intricacies. The only way to get more out of FinOps is to turn the day-to-day management to the vendor so enterprises can focus on critical processes and invest in other potential areas.

Challenges In Partnering With A Dedicated FinOps Vendor

  1. Multi-cloud management: Many organizations have moved toward a multi-cloud infrastructure, but only a few vendors can offer a comprehensive view across all these resources. This creates a need for more than one FinOps partner.

     

  2. Organization-wide cultural shift: With a FinOps vendor, the existing cloud consumption and budgeting models need to be streamlined to bring in better usage accountability among various teams.

     

  3. Choosing the right partner: There are plenty of active vendors to choose from in the FinOps market. These organizations either provide a niche set of offerings through a SaaS or DIY platform, focusing on cloud components such as compute optimization, storage optimization, or zombie resource optimization.

Even though there are a few potential roadblocks, the benefits of a FinOps partnership outweigh the challenges. Most of these issues could be resolved by offering training and awareness to key stakeholders and decision-makers.

Conclusion

The FinOps market is growing exponentially as more organizations realize the potential benefits. Ultimately, FinOps outsourcing should be based on the fitment between the organization’s culture, objectives and technology gaps and the product or service offered by the vendor.

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