Tidal Hearts FinOps

Tidal is proud to welcome Shana Cunha to the team as our Director of FinOps Strategy. Working in the cloud since 2015 at AWS and holding the FinOps Practitioner certification, Shana has worked with many Enterprises ensuring maximum return of their Cloud Investment and seeking opportunities to deliver value to customers around the globe.

We asked Shana for her thoughts on FinOps and what it means to Tidal customers.

A Little History

Around 2012, early public cloud scalers like Adobe and Intuit started implementing cloud cost management practices into their business and soon after, other enterprises initiated similar approaches of cloud financial management across their culture. Nowadays, FinOps is becoming a critical part of businesses’ optimisation strategy and cloud cost management.

What is FinOps?

FinOps is an operating model for the Cloud that aims to bring Business, Finance and Technology teams together to achieve financial stability and profitability by mastering the unit of Cloud Economics. Cost Optimisation and Cloud Financial Management are not a linear process, but a continuous refining and improvement of processes over a system’s entire lifecycle.

FinOps is not simply about saving money, but it’s about how you can successfully manage your cloud costs to make money. The more you master in the FinOps space, the better you’ll spend; this can have great impact on your revenue, eg. faster services & products, faster features and implementation.

Problem Statement

More and more businesses are migrating to the cloud to leverage its flexibility and ‘pay as you go’ model of Cloud Computing, however, since cloud consumption happens continuously, companies are often hit by bill shocks and Financial Management is overlooked until things are out of control.

Even though a cloud journey can raise a range of new obstacles and concerns to businesses, managing cloud expenditure continues to be one of the most challenging.

Due to lack of planning, more and more organisations struggle with control over their cloud spend, impacting a cloud migration to normally go over budget (55%), and spend more time than planned (64%).

According to FinOps Foundation, “Through 2020, 80% of organisations will initially overshoot their IaaS budget, due to a lack of cloud cost optimisation governance and misguided upfront cloud spend commitments”

Why FinOps?

FinOps is part of an IT way of life. The Digital Transformation mantra that’s popular amongst both business and IT executives is really a fundamental change to an organization’s way of doing business, it’s like a new operating system for your organization. It’s very important to start executing FinOps strategies from the initial migration discovery stages and POCs, to the on-going operation of production workloads, to achieve business goals while minimising costs and allowing businesses to maximise return of their cloud investment.

FinOps maturity differs from company to company, but if you are new in the FinOps space, start small and improve overtime. I highly encourage a “crawl, walk, run” approach to get started as you may burn out if you try to “ run” too soon, so don’t try everything at once.

An example of the “crawl” stage: start by allocating budgets and costs to teams and provide them with real-time, granular visibility into their spending.

Solution

Although cloud cost management can be challenging, it can also be a great opportunity to drive efficient consumption of IT.

Being able to analyse costs and redesign as part of your cloud journey is a great step to ensure a successful migration to the cloud - on time and within budget - by using Tidal.

Data-Driven Cloud Migrations not only saves time, but money too!

Following a layered-approach to discovery, Tidal provides you with an automated assessment of your software usage, defects, vulnerabilities, and more. It empowers you with data and analytics to make data-driven planning and design decisions for your cloud journey.

You’ll know exactly what to expect before your cloud migration - This is the source of truth for your migration.

I’m very excited to be joining the Tidal team and contribute to our customers’ successful and cost-aware cloud journey! Looking forward to making some great announcements regarding how we will assist even more on our customers’ cloud adoption in a cost efficient and scalable way in the near future. Reach out if you would like to discuss application assessments and FinOps: info@tidalcloud.com