The rising costs of doing business is affecting everyone, however, by increasing understanding of where cloud spend is allocated and working with AC3, customers can begin to optimise resource usage, and reduce cloud spend. A portmanteau of Finance and DevOps, FinOps, encourages communication and understanding between business and engineering to enable customers to get the most value out of cloud spend.
Introducing a FinOps engagement is not only good for the bottom line, but increases visibility over where costs are being generated in your technical environments. AC3 are uniquely placed to assist with not only the technical aspects of a cloud environment, but also the financial side of it as well.
In order to understand and assist with cloud optimisation, AC3 FinOps team, would go through the three stages of FinOps, Inform, Optimise and Operate, working with our customer to get the best outcomes possible.
Inform – Visibility and Allocation
It is difficult to understand where cloud spend is being used, without proper visibility. AC3 has tools and understanding around analysis to assist with visibility and developing capabilities for forecasting and budgeting. An important part of the inform phase is ensuring that the tagging strategy of Cloud assets is being utilised and AC3 can assist with the review of current state.
Optimise– Rates and Usage
In this step, AC3 help to identify opportunities to improve cloud usage efficiency and spend, using the data drawn from the inform phase. Opportunities include: Rightsizing, scheduling, terminating unused assets, reservations and collaborating with teams to ensure ongoing tagging accuracy, as well as identifying opportunities to increase value from the investments made into cloud architecture.
Operate – Continuous Improvement and Usage
Activities in this step involve making organisational changes to ensure that FinOps becomes the norm, not the exception. This utilises data and lessons learnt in the previous two stages, to help assist with implementation of governance, compliance monitoring and developing policies that are all aligned with organisational goals.
How AC3 can help get the best of your public cloud experience?
Working with AC3, we help our customers, by working with your technical, finance and business teams to increase collaboration, understanding and incremental action based on the data that is continuously generated in the inform phase. The process of FinOps is iterative and does not stop at the point where Operate has been completed. We are working towards introducing a maturity in the environment, with policies and frameworks that a customer can take advantage of as well.
Crawl, Walk, Run. Let’s get you moving.