What is FinOps? At a high level, that’s an easy question to answer: FinOps is any practice that helps to optimise cloud spending.
If you drill down deeper, however, you realise that FinOps isn’t so simple to define – let alone operationalise. FinOps isn’t a singular practice; on the contrary, it encompasses a wide range of processes and strategies, and it’s practiced by different organisations in different ways.
That’s why getting the most out of FinOps requires an understanding of the many approaches to FinOps. To provide guidance, this article walks through what I call the four stages of FinOps maturity and identifies opportunities where businesses can double down on their FinOps initiatives, even if they already have some cloud cost optimisation practices in place.
The challenges and opportunities of FinOps
Before diving into best practices for leveraging the full value of FinOps, let’s discuss what FinOps means.
Most definitions of FinOps sum it up as a practice (some folks say “discipline”) dedicated to optimising costs in the cloud.
That’s not wrong, but I’d suggest a…
