[Advertorial] Most organizations have now had their first experience with the cloud. The next phase is to cultivate maturity. In this series of three articles, we present three best practices to get more out of the cloud and analytics. In the first part, we explain how you can use FinOps to control the costs of your cloud strategy.

When experimenting with the cloud, the cost is often not on the mind. Logically, because there is no upfront payment required, so users don’t have to ask for a budget first. As long as it’s a pilot project, the cost of the cloud is quite low. But you quickly realize that the cloud is a victim of its own success. The technology is simple in design and perfectly suited to self-service, which leads to a rapid increase in the number of users and projects. The cost is not lagging behind either, but many organizations don’t realize this until it’s too late.

What is FinOps?

Should you then turn off the tap and reduce the use of the cloud in the company? That is an option, but usually not the best one for the company. FinOps aims to answer this by linking the costs in the cloud to the value it delivers to the company. For example, if you attract ten times more customers through a cloud application, you can’t really call it a bad investment. So FinOps is not about cutting costs, but about better understanding expenses and making sure they are spent in the right places.

Of course, FinOps is not a magic solution. Much depends on the applications and tools you work with. For example, it is difficult to monitor applications that are not cloud native. This is precisely why we developed SAS Viya as a successor to our old SAS 9 architecture, which was not designed to work in the cloud. SAS Viya is much more cloud-aware and can scale up and down more flexibly, resulting in better cost control for users.

How do you implement FinOps in your company? The following three steps are essential:

1. Merge your data

Like everything today, FinOps starts with collecting data. For companies that have already built a certain level of maturity in the cloud, this can be quite complex. They often work with more than one cloud provider, so the information comes in through different invoices. If you know that a monthly invoice from Amazon, for example, can consist of hundreds of thousands of lines, then you realize that we can no longer fit cloud usage into an Excel spreadsheet.

In addition, there may be other costs that we need to calculate within FinOps. Consider software-as-a-service applications that use the cloud. To integrate FinOps, you need to consolidate and enrich that data as best as possible at the source. This actually creates a kind of data warehouse, and of course a data analytics platform like SAS can help with that. Technology is a good foundation to immediately gain control of data and prepare it for use within FinOps.

2. Communicate about your cloud costs

According to Gartner, companies that don’t optimize their cloud usage end up spending up to 70% more than expected without achieving the desired profit. The second step of a good FinOps strategy is therefore communication. If you don’t make your employees aware of the costs this creates, there’s a good chance that these costs will continue to accrue and may even increase.

Many cloud providers offer a dashboard where you can see a lot of information about your use of their services and the associated costs. But of course this dashboard is limited to your own cloud and cannot show the business value of a project for the company. You must therefore establish the link with the company yourself via FinOps. You should then incorporate this information into your communication strategy so that employees can quickly assess whether their cloud spending is adding value. This can range from a simple email to an interactive dashboard or report. The more transparency, the more efficiently teams can work in the cloud.

3. Define best practices through a Cloud Center of Excellence

Ideally, FinOps is part of the company culture. A Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) can help with this. For example, by creating best practices or reports. Such a CCoE is often more technical in nature, but FinOps must go beyond technical services. It should encourage users to think about how much the costs are, what those costs mean and whether they are using the cloud correctly. The latter can be achieved, among other things, by turning off expensive cloud services or temporarily shutting them down when they are not being used.

As companies increasingly move to the cloud, FinOps is essential to keep costs under control. SAS supports this in a number of ways. Firstly, by providing additional data from the SAS platform so that companies can better control their cloud usage. Secondly, by making its own architecture cloud-native (SAS Viya) and thus optimizing customers’ cloud usage.

And soon we’ll go even further with SAS Viya Workbench. This enables access to SAS Viya from the cloud provider marketplace. The advantage? You’re less dependent on specialist knowledge when installing SAS Viya in the cloud. In addition, these “workbenches” can be easily and quickly switched on and off by the user and you can scale them individually – even with specific infrastructure such as GPUs or particularly fast storage. This makes it easier to allocate costs to a specific user and further optimize.

Of course, technology is just one ingredient for implementing FinOps. Ultimately, this practice must become part of the culture of the organization, and therefore people and skills must also be given sufficient attention. In the next article, we will present three best practices to get started in the context of cloud and analytics.

This article is the first in a series of three articles on best practices for getting more out of the cloud and analytics.

This is a commercial contribution from SAS. The editors are not responsible for the content.