A Variable Cloud Model Means a Variable Cloud Journey 

At AHEAD, we often see customers who claim to have a FinOps team, but after further discussion and investigation, it’s revealed that this team is not well equipped to deliver results. This is often no fault of their own – cloud is expansive and expensive, and these team members are often pulled in a million different ways, faced with steep learning curves, or both.  

One way we like to take the pulse of where these teams are successful or falling short is by looking at the FinOps Maturity Model. This model is defined by the FinOps Foundation, and breaks down what every organization might expect to see at a Crawl, Walk, or Run stage for various cloud domains and capabilities.  

Cloud is variable, and your journey to FinOps maturity will be, by necessity, iterative. But it’s important to note that virtually no organization will be able to reach the Run stage in every domain. This is partly because it’s impractical and expensive to do so, and partly because achieving maximum outcomes for every aspect of cloud does not mean you are achieving the maximum outcomes for your particular business goals.  

Read on to learn more about the stages of FinOps maturity and how AHEAD has helped customers along their journeys. 

Domain 1: Understand Cloud Usage and Cost 

This is the area where you work to fully understand your use of the cloud. What are you using in the cloud, what are you spending, who is responsible for the spending, what metrics matter to you in cloud, and what are the impact of those metrics on other parts of the business? For example, your cloud usage could impact anything from overall budget to carbon emission or other ESG goals. And finally, who has access to all this cloud data, and does that access enable other teams to adhere to FinOps processes? 

Crawl 

• Little if any reporting and tooling 
• Inconsistent data points from various sources 
• Basic KPIs and even more basic insights derived from them 
• Few processes and little internal oversight 
• Slow to identify and manage anomalies in cloud usage 

Walk 

• Reporting and tooling are consistent 
• Data ingestion is clear and gives insight into anomalies and edge cases impacting business results 
• Automation and regulated processes have helped address basic issues in cloud operations 
• Most of the organization is on board with processes, enabling organization to meet goals 
• The most difficult cloud issues affecting the financial well-being of the organization have been identified, but cannot yet be resolved 

Run 

• Cloud usage is understood by all teams in the organization 
• Difficult cloud issues are being addressed 
• Most cloud operations are automated 
• Greater than 90% of spend can be allocated 
• Forecast spend vs. actual spend variance is 12% or less 

Domain 2: Quantify Business Value 

Here’s where you connect your cloud usage and cost data to the business value it creates. Cost refers to more than just money, as you can and should also weigh usage costs against application availability and reliability, or customer satisfaction with an app. Maturing the ways in which you map value to budget helps you decide how to forecast costs, establish KPIs, and benchmark performance across teams and business units. 

Crawl 

• Little to no understanding of monetary and non-monetary value of cloud usage
• No established measurements for that value
• Spending and usage not aligned to organizational objectives
• Spending is out of line with comparable examples from other parts of the business

Walk 

• Solid understanding of cloud usage value
• Able to measure value across teams
• Cloud spending and usage in line with organization’s strategic goals
• Spending is commensurate with other parts of the business

Run 

• Cost savings and avoidance by measuring cost savings through optimization and proactive measures (e.g. eliminating waste and right sizing resources) 
• Operational efficiency by tracking the automation rate and time to insight on actionable tasks 
• Financial accountability with show back + charge back models 
• Business agility with speed of decision making and flexibility in resource allocation 
• Stakeholder satisfaction by collecting feedback on FinOps transparency and user adoption 

Domain 3: Optimize Cloud Usage and Cost 

Once you understand your cloud usage and business value, it’s time for your architects to focus on cloud efficiency. How can you limit the use of resources to when they provide value to the organization? How do you ensure that resource costs are low or that licensed and SaaS products aren’t eating up too much of the budget? How does a modern cloud architecture and rate and workload optimization further drive down cloud costs? 

Crawl 

• Engineering and product teams unaware of cloud usage 
• Architecture, design, and licensing choices are disparate or outdated 
• Resource usage and placement over time does not meet demand for organization goals 
• Cloud cost is not meeting financial goals  

Walk 

• Engineering and product teams responsible and accountable for cloud usage 
• Architecture, design, and licensing choices are modernized for cloud-native engineering 
• Resource usage and placement matches organizational demand 
• Cloud cost is appropriate for business goals 

Run 

• Automated processes enable engineering and product teams to use cloud services more efficiently 
• Resource usage and placement maximizes performance, scalability, and operational objectives 
• Architecture, design, and licensing choices helps the organization see savings in cloud cost greater than 20% 

Domain 4: Manage the FinOps Practice 

FinOps doesn’t end with optimizing cloud usage. It requires continuous change management of the entire organization. This is the area that enables the entire organization to use cloud to generate value for the business. It heavily involves everyone’s favorite activity – breaking down organizational silos – but that effort pays off in continuous efficiency, even in times of major changes to infrastructure or monumental pivots in business goals.  

Crawl 

• Siloed teams and an inefficient organizational structure 
• Little to no organizational culture surrounding FinOps 
• Little to no education or training on cloud usage for various personas 
• No ongoing measurement for governance or accountability 

Walk 

• A dedicated FinOps team and open communication with other disciplines 
• Some organizational culture around FinOps 
• Education or training on cloud usage available 
• Governance or accountability processes established and measured 

Run 

• FinOps team size and overall organizational structure optimized to enable everyone to use cloud in a way that generates business value 
• Healthy organizational FinOps culture 
• Education or training customized for various personas 
• Governance or accountability processes help to exceed cloud usage goals year after year 

Why No Organization Ever Quite Reaches Run 

The Run stage in any cloud domain is full of lofty goals, and it is difficult if not impossible for organizations to reach this stage themselves. After all, FinOps is more than just technology – it’s people, processes, and technology. Organizations that build out internal FinOps teams find that even the most savvy technologists or financial analysts only have so many hours in their day. There’s competing business requirements and tasks that take time away from their FinOps focuses. And there is always a new cloud resource or service, a new process, a new workload, a new evolutionary state, a new standardization, a new you-name-it to consider in the ever-growing list of calculations they must make to save their organization money on cloud. 

But what if they had help from a dedicated FinOps partner? 

How AHEAD Can Get You Speed Walking 

AHEAD FinOps teams take a holistic look at your finances, tools and technologies, and operational practices to make sure your organization is getting the most business impact out of every dollar you spend on cloud. We track cloud spending across your business, eliminate costs through rightsizing, workload placement, and automation, and devise the right governance and chargeback models to contain runaway spend. And we help you accurately forecast your cloud spending with Predictive Cloud Modeling grounded in your business forecast, not tech specs.  

Through our Cloud FinOps teams, clients have consistently achieved 10-30% savings on average over three-year engagements. Recently, we helped a major airline reduce cloud costs by $12M, implementing governance practices to ensure sustained savings. For a large energy company, our team cut monthly cloud expenses by $90,000, delivering annual savings of approximately 25%. Meanwhile, a leading American food distributor is well on its way to optimizing costs, with our team identifying a $2M yearly savings opportunity. Through focused, monthly sprints, we are driving substantial savings tailored to their needs. 

Let our teams focus on savings, and your cloud experts focus on cloud. 

Learn more about how to speed walk with AHEAD FinOps.