3 Red Flags That Indicate Your FinOps Strategy Is Failing

A poor FinOps strategy can lead to unwanted costs, confusion, and long-term concerns when the bills outpace your budget. Here are three warning signs to look out for, with tips to improve future action plans.

Your business divisions arrange cloud partnerships at will

Without a clear, unified strategy and specific guidelines everyone follows, business units might forge individual cloud partnerships with different suppliers and systems. Think of the added complexity this creates.

Managed enterprise-wide agreements can maximize enterprise discounts, accelerate company-wide migration and cloud adoption, deliver faster and more complete support, and many other benefits. Needlessly complex tech stacks can also leave your organization unprepared for partnership opportunities with other cloud service providers.

What to do:

Get everyone on the same page right at the start by establishing an enterprise-wide cloud center of excellence (CCoE). Your CCoE can help promote cross-organization adoption of a cloud solution, determine consistent standards, and set you up for enterprise-scale discounts that make the most of your investment in cloud technology.

Your cloud solutions are siloed and opaque

Without the proper FinOps cloud practices, your enterprise can become burdened by cloud solutions created in silos without standards, best practices, or adequate training. These inconsistent or inappropriately sized and scaled solutions can also lead to unnecessary cost acceleration – particularly risky given the current speed of cloud and DevOps progression.

What to do:

Include FinOps in your engineers’ cloud management mandate. This allows you to optimize your total cost of ownership (TCO) for your cloud-related assets and solutions. The goal is to balance both the profound benefits of the cloud with the costs of cloud-based solutions within a cost optimization framework.

Consider a proactive, cross-departmental strategy that unites different, more relevant datasets to support all team stakeholders actively. This will create clarity and streamline your use of resources. Standards defined by your CCoE should also include consistent access to resources and training. Taking all these steps will boost your team’s productivity and efficiency.

You struggle with uncontrolled cloud sprawl

Cloud sprawl happens when you continue adding new services to the cloud but overlook combining or eliminating aging services. Over time, without realizing it, duplicate and abandoned services are consuming valuable resources. And the more it grows, the less control and visibility you have over your cloud resources. Security, compliance, and the ability to collaborate seamlessly across the organization can be affected. Also, the cumulative costs of cloud sprawl can significantly eat into your enterprise budget.

What to do:

Establishing your cloud processes and KPIS early, and being consistent in tracking them, will help you manage and mitigate unnecessary spending before it gets out of hand. Doing so also presents a valuable opportunity to initiate cost-benefit optimization across technology decisions, IT assets, staff, and skills.