FinOps Challenges: How to Overcome the Inertia & Get Started

Solutions Review’s Contributed Content Series is a collection of contributed articles written by thought leaders in enterprise tech. In this feature, Vega Cloud‘s Director of Technical Optimization Michael Arkoosh offers commentary on FinOps challenges, specifically on how to properly get started.

If I told you there was a way to slash your cloud bill without compromising on performance, you’d want to start saving immediately, right?

In theory, the answer is an obvious “yes.” But in practice, as I find in my job helping businesses streamline their cloud computing costs by embracing the discipline of FinOps, actually getting started with cloud cost optimization often turns out to be much easier said than done. For a variety of reasons, businesses tend to be reluctant to operationalize FinOps strategies despite the clear benefits they stand to gain by doing so.

Yet, finding ways to overcome that inertia is essential for any business that wants to optimize its cloud strategy from a financial perspective. Let’s talk about tips for getting started with FinOps as quickly as possible so you can start saving now – not months or years into the future.

Why Getting Started with FinOps Can Be Challenging

The reason why organizations often struggle to get started with FinOps is not that business leaders and finance teams aren’t eager to rein in unnecessary cloud spending (they are). Nor are engineers too lazy to make the changes necessary to optimize cloud costs (they aren’t because they usually recognize the value of streamlining cloud spending, too).

Instead, the inertia typically stems from one or more of the following challenges:

• Fear of risk: FinOps entails making changes to cloud services and configurations. Sometimes, engineers are reluctant to make those changes because they worry about unintended consequences, such as performance degradation. As a result, they may resist FinOps implementation until they’ve spent months testing and validating proposed changes.
• Perception of limited value: In some cases – especially in cloud environments where there are many small things that are not optimized from a spending perspective but no huge mistakes – it’s hard for stakeholders to recognize just how much they stand to save through FinOps. They may be reluctant to get started because they don’t think the savings are worth the effort.
• Siloed stakeholders: FinOps requires collaboration between finance experts and technology experts. But at some organizations, each of these teams operates in a silo, making it difficult for them to come together to get a FinOps initiative underway.

FinOps Delays Mean Business Delays

Whatever the cause of FinOps inaction, it has profoundly negative consequences for the business. Every day that goes by without investment in cloud cost optimization translates to money that the organization leaves on the table.

For example, imagine your business spends $100,000 per month on cloud virtual machine instances. Imagine, too, that switching from on-demand to savings plan-covered instances could save you 33 percent. This is an example of a change that is low in risk (because in this case, you’re only changing the pricing option for a cloud service, not the workload itself) and could deliver tremendous savings. But if you wait six months to implement the change because that’s how long it takes for your finance and engineering teams to come together, you’ve wasted $198,000.

The impact of that waste extends beyond a mere increase in operating costs. It becomes money that you can’t invest in more productive pursuits, such as hiring more engineers to work on your product. In this respect, FinOps inaction can stunt business growth. Each dollar that you waste in the cloud could translate to multiple dollars in lost revenue down the line.

How to Start Cutting Cloud Spending Today

How do you overcome FinOps inertia? The answer depends, of course, on the precise causes of FinOps inaction in your organization.

But in general, the single most important step that businesses can take to launch FinOps initiatives is to stop over-analyzing changes to cloud services and configurations. Instead of waiting until engineers have validated every facet of every proposed change, organizations should accept that there is some level of risk associated with FinOps – just as there is a risk with any business initiative – and that the risk is worth it if it unlocks the potential for major cloud savings.

By all means, it’s reasonable to test major changes ahead of time. If your FinOps strategy involves migrating workloads from virtual machines to containers, for example, you’ll want to spend some time ensuring that the changes align with your business’s performance, reliability, and security needs. But in the meantime, you can make other, less risky changes – such as, again, migrating from an on-demand model to a savings plan-covered model.

As for the lack of eagerness to get started with FinOps due to low perceived value, the best solution there is to start making small, low-effort cloud cost optimization changes and let them speak for themselves. For example, deleting unattached EBS volumes is a fast and simple action that will create noticeable cost savings once you’ve removed enough volumes. By doing this, it becomes easier to get attention and buy-in from stakeholders for more substantial FinOps changes.

Lastly, if organizational silos are a barrier to FinOps adoption, appointing dedicated FinOps analysts (who could be internal to your organization or whom you could hire as consultants) also helps to accelerate the launch of FinOps initiatives. When you make it someone’s job to get FinOps underway, it tends to become easier to break through the organizational silos that stymy some FinOps initiatives. In addition, personnel who focus on FinOps can help bring together the various teams and business functions – like engineering and finance – that must participate in FinOps, then help them overcome hurdles and share best practices.

Conclusion: From FinOps inaction to FinOps in action

While getting started with FinOps can be a real challenge, the good news is that after a FinOps initiative is underway, it tends to be easy to keep it moving. Once your finance and engineering teams have come together to take the first steps and have begun to recognize the value of FinOps, they’ll be eager for more.

So, don’t let the difficulty of the first steps stunt your ability to cut extraneous spending in the cloud. Invest the effort necessary to take the leap, then enjoy the natural momentum that follows.