Cloud Value Optimisation with FinOps

You are under constant pressure to do more, with less. You moved to cloud with high expectations of reducing costs, saving time and driving growth.

But your IT costs are steadily (and sometimes unexpectedly) rising, and you need to find a way to get better value for money.

Cloud helps you be more responsive to the business, but it comes at a cost

Cloud services can significantly increase the value you provide to the business by taking advantage of vendor investments and scale. They give you a way to do more, and faster, without having to grow your team.

But cloud costs are complex because they are variable, hard to see and even harder to predict. The challenge of getting timely, accurate data about cloud spending is made even more difficult when spending decisions are distributed across the business.

An astonishing 83% of CIOs report spending more on cloud services than anticipated¹. Even if that is seen as a necessity for the moment, you know increased costs won’t be accepted for long. You need a way to get back in control.

Lacking control is going to get more expensive

Unexpected costs often arise when applications are not designed for cloud efficiency. And as business units increasingly drive technology choices and decisions, IT cost controls are often side-stepped.

AI and data technologies promise improved business efficiency but have very complex pricing structures. If you don’t know how to set them up appropriately, there is a high risk of runaway costs and significant bill shock.

The way we managed IT budgets in the past just doesn’t work today. Cloud benefits such as fast deployment, flexibility and scalability are a double-edged sword, if you don’t have the right controls in place.

Unrestrained spending isn’t the answer, but neither is stifling innovation.

You need a new type of control

You can’t go back to the past, because business expectations have changed.  If you tightly restrict your cloud platforms, you remove your ability to innovate. Your teams will fail to deliver, not just go over budget.

You need a way to get all the benefits of cloud, without the cost uncertainty.  

Cloud value optimisation with FinOps gives you the best of both worlds

There is a way to manage cloud spending and turn it into a strategic enabler for business growth. To be successful, you need to address both the technical and organisational challenges presented by cloud economics.

Successful cloud value optimisation involves creating a group of stakeholders who can represent leadership, architecture, development, finance and product or business needs. This group needs to have clear accountability to analyse the cost and benefit of any new initiatives and provide holistic ongoing governance.

Establishing an empowered, cross-functional group with clear accountability and effective practices typically realises:

• Immediate financial impact: Savings of 10-15% of total cloud spend, increasing to 20-30% savings in the long term.
• Improved predictability and control: Reduced volatility in spending, confidence in cloud expenditure and informed decision making and governance.
• Improved business value: Aligning cloud investments with business priorities, with clear Return on Investment (ROI) and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
• Enhanced ability to innovate: Freeing your teams with automation, enabling safe autonomy and supporting data-driven decisions. 

Our approach to help you truly benefit from cloud investments

Our cloud value optimisation services are based on a structured approach to first control spend, then gain efficiency and finally unlock business value growth. It is rooted in proven FinOps practices, with a collaborative, human-centred process to simplify adoption.

We use an iterative approach to prioritise changes and focus on creating the most value as early as possible. Equinox IT's structured approach includes three phases:

1. Discover: Discussing your business objectives and how well your needs are currently being met, we can define metrics for success. We then evaluate your current cloud usage and existing practices against FinOps standards. Together we will agree the opportunities for improvement and prioritise those based on the business value they will deliver.
2. Enable: Co-creation with your teams ensures smooth adoption of the changes, as we jointly work through the plan of prioritised improvements. These will likely include both the implementation of technical controls and defining changes to your practices. We will implement quick wins in this phase to deliver immediate business value.
3. Improve: We will help your teams to adopt new practices, governance mechanisms and accountability structures. These, along with technical guardrails and controls, will form the basis for your ongoing, data-driven continuous performance improvements. We will also show you how these improvements can benefit your overall IT environment, not just cloud.

¹ CIOs are overspending on the cloud — but still think it’s worth it