Key considerations for implementing Sustainable FinOps
Sustainable FinOps offers compelling business benefits, but how do you turn a well-intentioned strategy into meaningful and sustained action?
When organizations are adopting Sustainable FinOps, they should focus on three essential success factors: building awareness, driving alignment, and ensuring accountability. Here are the most important activities in each area for when organizations are planning their journey to more sustainable and cost-efficient cloud operations:
If people are unaware of an issue, they won’t do anything to resolve it, so it’s critical to increase the visibility of cloud consumption, costs, and CO2 emissions. Transparency is vital; when users and application owners can see financial and sustainability metrics related to their cloud usage, they can make informed, data-driven decisions.
Greater visibility and transparency also make it easier for FinOps teams to identify and prioritize optimization opportunities and educate users on how to take advantage of them.
It’s crucial that a Sustainable FinOps strategy is aligned with the organization’s overall cloud strategy – any conflicts will impede the execution of both strategies. The strategy should also define meaningful KPIs directly linked to financial, sustainability, and strategic business outcomes.
The next layer of alignment is to secure executive sponsorship and application owner buy-in for Sustainable FinOps. It’s essential to illustrate the potential cost savings and CO2 reductions and show how these will help the organization build long-term resilience and competitive advantage.
It’s also important to publish and regularly update cloud usage guidance so application owners and engineering teams can make better-informed decisions aligned with the Sustainable FinOps strategy.
To take ownership of their cloud usage and execute optimizations effectively, people need tools and automation capabilities that make it simple to follow Sustainable FinOps guidance. Strong governance is also essential to ensure everyone follows Sustainable FinOps guidelines consistently and monitors and reports on the right KPIs.
Accountability for cloud usage can be a mindset shift for many organizations. It’s important to create a culture of accountability through ongoing education programs and regular communication with users and application owners, and IT, finance, and procurement teams. While Sustainable FinOps is a highly collaborative approach, the final decision always rests with the application owner.