Why Collaboration Between ITAM and FINOPS Matters

Introduction

According to recent research by Gartner, end-user spending on public cloud services will reach $396 billion in 2021 and grow 21.7% to reach $482 billion in 2022. By 2026, Gartner predicts public cloud spending will exceed 45% of all enterprise IT spending, up from less than 17% in 2021.

Companies are moving to the cloud to maintain their competitive edge, accelerate innovation, and transform interactions with customers, employees, and partners. 

But keeping cloud costs under control is notoriously hard. Cloud assets are fragmented across multiple teams, vendors, and containerized and non-containerized environments. Cloud spending is vulnerable to significant fluctuations, making it difficult to forecast and keep under control.

ITAM & FINOPS

The FinOps framework is quite familiar to all ITAM managers and demonstrates the synergies between the two disciplines. Both have similar objectives, and the ITAM team can provide valuable insights to the FinOps team as technology visibility, optimization, and ongoing evaluation is an area that, although hugely familiar to ITAM managers, represents a real blind spot for many FinOps practitioners.

The FinOps Framework consists of 3 distinct phases:

Inform

This is the starting point and critical to the FinOps process – visibility of all your cloud assets and their associated costs, and then allocating these costs to the user or business unit.

Optimize

In this process, you need to look at optimizing your cloud spending. These cost savings can be achieved by right-sizing virtual machines and databases, turning off unused resources, and using reserved instances.

Operate

In this process, you need to look at optimizing your cloud spending. Cloud is only effective when it is as closely aligned to business objectives – so constant evaluation is required. Any misalignment can result in significant wasted spending very quickly, so this step is key. This process can never be completed as new cloud technologies are implemented, and constant changes to these cloud environments are inevitable. This is an ongoing process that needs to be unending to ensure full cloud optimization.

FinOps teams typically lack

• Visibility of on-premises license entitlements.
• Knowledge of licensing rules across vendors.
• Experience to interpret the rules and apply to current/planned scenarios.

This is the information that the ITAM team manages daily. Working together can lighten workloads, increase efficiencies, and reduce spending.