FinOps Maturity Assessment - 5 days

Traditionally, technology was used in a very static way with complex business cases and long procurement cycles. Procurement was the gatekeeper and approver of new hardware purchases, usually with deliberate oversizing and no guarantee of accuracy. Spending was predictable and static with known costs, but with little room for improvement or innovation.

Public Cloud & DevOps have broken traditional procurement processes. Digital transformation has required companies to accelerate technology delivery to meet customer demand using the cloud. This shift has placed the power and responsibility to procure cloud resources in the hands of developers and engineers and removed the constraints of scalability and flexibility. But this new way of procuring cloud resources also identifies the need for a new way of collaboration within the organisation.

FinOps is the new operating model for the Cloud. FinOps is the practice of bringing technology, business and finance together to master the unit economics of cloud for competitive advantage. It brings financial accountability to the variable spend model of cloud and enables organizations to get maximum business value by collaborating on data-driven spending decisions.

The enthusiasm in initial cloud adoption is often quickly quashed by failure to meet financial and operational targets. FinOps assists customers in taking back control of cloud spend, while maintaining the flexibility of cloud consumption within predefined guardrails and establishing a cloud financial management maturity baseline: a solid FinOps foundation will help you to grow your Azure environment in a financially responsible way.

With the FinOps Maturity Assessment, Inetum-Realdolmen assists enterprises to identify their current FinOps maturity level, by collecting business requirements, performing a hands-on technical review of the existing Azure environment and gathering relevant business and process information during questionnaire-based workshops. Based on the collected information, we will list the quick-wins to save on Azure cost and identify opportunities to improve the existing processes, strategy and internal organization, according to the desired maturity level per domain. Recommendations are listed based on proven best practices and a high-level roadmap is presented and further discussed with the customer to plan these optimizations.

Implementing FinOps in an Azure environment can result in significant cost savings, improved resource utilization, better financial planning, and enhanced collaboration between different teams within an organization.

Following topics will be covered:

• Cost Optimization: FinOps helps you gain better visibility into your Azure spending patterns. This allows you to identify areas of overspending or inefficiencies and take corrective actions, resulting in reduced Azure consumption costs.

• Budget Management: FinOps encourages the setting of budgets and alerts to prevent unexpected cost overruns. This proactive approach helps teams stay within financial limits and ensures better financial planning.

• Resource Optimization: By analyzing usage patterns and performance metrics, FinOps helps you rightsize your Azure resources. You can identify underutilized instances and services, resize or shut them down, and make better decisions about resource allocation.

• Forecasting and Planning: FinOps enables accurate forecasting of future Azure costs based on historical usage patterns. This helps in budgeting, long-term planning, and aligning cloud resources with business needs.

• Cost Allocation: FinOps provides mechanisms to allocate costs to different organizational entities, fostering accountability and transparency.

The schedule for the engagement is as follows:

1. Day 1: Kickoff workshop: We start this engagement by defining the high-level approach for the assessment. Expected timelines are presented and validated. People and/or roles who need to be involved during the different workshops are identified and practical arrangements and prerequisites to perform the assessment are validated.

2. Day 2: Business Alignment workshop: we continue our engagement by gathering information related to focused FinOps capabilities, business priorities and existing/expected cost organization. The output from the Business Alignment Workshop will be used as input and guideline for the FinOps Maturity Assessment.

3. Day 3 and 4: The FinOps Maturity Assessment considers the different domains as identified by the FinOps Framework of the FinOps Foundation, the industry standard for Cloud FinOps practices. Domains covered: • Strategy & Governance • Cloud Usage and Cost • Showback & Chargeback • Performance Tracking • Usage & Rate Optimization • Organizational Alignment

4. Day 4: FinOps Review meeting: We will summarize our finding of the review and our recommendations for bringing the FinOps maturity to the next level, based on the FinOps assessment report.