The 5 Cs of FinOps: Continuous Improvement

A cloud financial management or FinOps practice can maximize the value of the cloud. It is a collaborative discipline where all stakeholders take ownership of their cloud usage with support from a central best practices group.

A strong FinOps practice incorporates the 5 Cs of FinOps.

Let’s talk about the fourth C of the 5 Cs of FinOps: Continuous Improvement.

Continuous Improvement takes several meanings in the context of FinOps. One is based on the speed of cloud technology. For example, a migration may start with a "lift and shift." Then, you may then modernize applications with cloud-native services and containers. Then, who knows what the future will bring? The continuous evolution of the cloud requires a similar shift in your FinOps strategies and the communication and education that goes along with it.

Continuous improvement is not always about technology. It can also be about communication, executive buy-in, or creating more value with your existing processes.

Ultimately, FinOps isn't something you just do once. It's an ongoing practice that optimizes your cloud usage and costs over time.

Right-sizing and right-costing are two significant continuous improvement methodologies that can help optimize your cloud environment.

Right-sizing resources tend to be a more technical process that considers the specifications of each resource running in your IT environment and then seeks the best possible configuration that supports the workload.

Right-sizing examples include:

• Choosing the right data center and optimal configurations for your workloads
• Considering the financial impact and actual utilization of virtual machines
• Finding and removing abandoned or orphaned cloud resources that eat away at margins without providing any clear benefit
• Modernization initiatives that ensure you get the most efficiency and ROI for your dollar
• Determining if a data center in another geographic region can handle specific workloads more efficiently without significant trade-offs
• Automating elastic right-sizing processes to ensure you only run the applications and resources that you need at the moment
• Employing automatic on/off processes for applications that aren't in constant use

With right-costing, you can leverage commercial resources to get the best deal on cloud solutions and software.

Right-costing examples include:

• Lowering your costs by transferring on-premises licenses to the cloud or removing unused solutions
• Negotiating for discounts or volume-based pricing with your cloud vendor
• Saving 50% to 70% off list pricing with reserved instances for services that you run consistently
• Leveraging savings plans

The cloud hyperscalers – AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure—frequently change their right-costing options to offer better pricing and flexibility. Staying informed of their changes will allow you to get the best pricing.