FinOps Foundation focuses on Cloud finances

FinOps leaders from Atlassian, Autodesk, Cloudability, Gannett, HERE Technologies, Just Eat, Nationwide and Spotify have joined together to announce the FinOps Foundation, a nonprofit trade association, focused on codifying and promoting cloud financial management best practices and standards.

Wednesday, 27th February 2019 Posted 5 years ago in by Phil Alsop

The mission of the FinOps Foundation is to empower distributed teams running in the cloud to operate at high velocity while optimising the unit economics of cloud deployments.

It was also announced today that O’Reilly Media will be publishing the first book of its kind, dedicated to FinOps and cloud financial management best practices.

“Over the years, I’ve worked with the top cloud spenders in the world as they paved the way and created a model for good cloud financial management that others can now follow with FinOps,” said J.R. Storment, Cofounder of Cloudability and President of the FinOps Foundation. “FinOps Foundation is a community where practitioners and executives alike on both sides of the aisle - Finance and Tech - can collaborate on practical everyday challenges to plan for the future of their cloud journey.”

Cloud spending is now a material amount of total IT spend. Gartner, a research and advisory firm, has stated the five-year CAGR (in constant USD) for the public cloud services market through 2022 is forecast at 16.6%, hitting USD 360.2 billion by 2022. Yet with all this growth, the cloud operating model is immature. As companies move away from the data center and its fixed cost model, to variable, consumption-based spending in the cloud, they must transform their financial operating model.

The FinOps operating model -- a combination of systems, best practices and culture - brings financial accountability to the variable spend model of cloud, enabling distributed teams to make business trade-offs between speed, cost and quality. Distributed decision making coupled with the move to variable spending in cloud, means that technology teams now must partner with finance and business teams to make informed decisions that drive continual optimisation. FinOps processes enable these teams to operate at high velocity while improving the unit economics of cloud.

The FinOps Foundation is an open membership community. Community members receive, access to the following resources:

FinOps.org - an independent online community, providing a forum to learn and share FinOps best practices. This website will provide access to cloud economic research, feature articles and commentary, FinOps success stories, and access to news and events taking place within the FinOps community, including FinOps training and meetup groups.
Early access to the O’Reilly forthcoming book, “Cloud Financial Management Strategies, Creating a Culture of FinOps,” a guide containing real world examples of successes and failures from large scale cloud spenders.
Special discounts on the CloudyCon FinOps User Conference taking place 10-12th September at the Marriott Waterfront in Burlingame, CA. CloudyCon will include headline speakers, technical breakouts, workshops and certification. For more details on registering or to sponsor the event, please visit https://www.cloudycon.com
Regular updates on FinOps training workshops, meetup groups and related events.