With the help of a customer host, Flexera gathered industry leaders, partners and customers for a full day, in-person FinOps and ITAM Think Tank. The purpose of this FinOps Think Tank was to engage deeply on all topics related to FinOps and the convergence with ITAM (Hybrid ITAM and FinOps), share best practices, learn from colleagues and hear from experts on the very hot topic of ITAM and FinOps convergence (and why every organization should be considering this). The event was highly interactive and thought provoking, producing a guide you can find here.
Cloud Management
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Along with the in-depth, energetic conversations and aha moments, the tips our customers offered were extremely valuable, and we’ve prepared a small selection of the outcomes here.
Process
- When starting, there is benefit to centralizing your discount purchasing and deployment, and decentralizing your optimization actions and execution
- Consider having a third party conduct FinOps modeling; this adds a level of validation to a transition or FinOps adoption
- Create a central place for communication (internal Sharepoint, etc.); keep information here about FinOps for all levels of your organization, e.g., “New to cloud? Here’s what you need to know” or “PaaS info”
- Make best friends with whoever owns your current commercial licenses or marketplace
Data
- Cloud and ITAM teams need to work closely to make sure existing license usage is optimized
- Have structure and discipline with tagging:
- Don’t have too many tags
- Don’t use anything sensitive in a tag (e.g., password)
- Do not use a role or person’s name in a tag
- Have an agreed-upon tagging dictionary with a list of acceptable, standardized tags
- Look beyond just cloud data; don’t forget BYOL, marketplace, etc.
- Look for low-hanging fruit, e.g., unused resources, like instances with zero-percent utilization, or storage volumes that haven’t been accessed in X amount of time
- Intelligence tiering for storage; not all storage is created equal, so don’t pay equal amounts for it; some data you need at your fingertips, so it will be more expensive than data/storage you are keeping just in case you are audited (and you never look at it OR you hope you never need to look at it)
Events
- Host a hackathon to see who can save the most in a set amount of time (e.g., 30 days)
- Host Spring Cleaning and Fall Housekeeping; consider cutting off anything noncritical over a weekend and see how much is saved
- Host internal team meeting with your different stakeholders; share with them “here’s what you’re spending, here’s what you could save” and consider showing savings as a percentage or annualized savings
- Host weekly cloud hygiene meetings; identify which applications are over budget, which servers need to be updated, etc.
FinOps is certainly not a small undertaking, but also one that provides consistent and measurable results, ensuring long-term success. As the convergence of ITAM and FinOps continues to drive forward in 2023 and beyond, learning from peers who have gone through these processes and team alignments is more valuable than ever. We hope you can use some of our customers’ best tips on your own FinOps journey.
To learn more, check out the full Flexera FinOps Think Tank Output guide.
