Anmol: Hello and welcome to another insightful episode of the Unthinkable Tech Podcast, the go-to source for the pulse on technology that’s shaping our future. I’m your host Anmol Satija and today we are going to talk about a business dilemma that’s been a real head-scratcher for many businesses out there.

As we all know, companies in pursuit of operational cost efficiency have eagerly migrated from the traditional on-premise infrastructure to the seemingly boundless realm of the cloud. So this move was expected to revolutionize budget management by shifting from fixed capital expenses to more adaptable operational costs.

However, the anticipated simplicity and cost savings have for some been overshadowed. By unexpected complexities and costs.

The cloud cost trap: Why cloud doesn’t always mean cheaper?

In fact, the numbers speak volumes, as a staggering 32% of cloud spending is wasted as organizations struggle to optimize their resources. Additionally, 80% of businesses acknowledge that their bottom line has suffered due to inefficient cloud financial management. And it’s no surprise then that 57% of the businesses in the cloud report cloud cost management as a constant concern.

So you know, this is where the discipline of FinOps comes into play. It’s not just about cutting costs, it’s about smartly integrating financial accountability into cloud operations. FinOps brings together technology, business, and finance to ensure that every dollar spent on the cloud is an investment toward innovation and growth.

So I’m very excited to welcome our domain expert, Gaurav Sharma, who is the COE lead of DevOps and Cloud at Unthinkable Solutions.

He possesses 17 long years of experience and has served almost 50-plus global clients. Today, he’ll guide us through the insights on FinOps and how to achieve financial intelligence with technological agility.

So get ready to delve into a discussion that can help you gain financial clarity. and operational excellence in the cloud.

A very warm welcome, Gaurav.

Gaurav: Thank you, Anmol. Glad to be here and looking forward to our discussion.

The six core principles of FinOps explained

Anmol: So am I, Gaurav. Let’s start with the very basics. So could you break down the core principles of FinOps for us and also shed some light on why is it becoming essential for cloud cost management?

Gaurav: So let’s try to understand why there is a need for FinOps. So the company started adopting the cloud, I believe, five to six years back. So some companies have already shifted to the cloud while some companies are still in the journey to adopt cloud in some model. So there were some clearly defined objectives behind this cloud adoption.

So one was scalability. The second one was agility so that you can meet your changing business demands. And last but not least, that is to achieve a cost performance. So the third one was cost efficiency.

If we compare the cloud with the on-premise model, so there is less OPEX and you need to control your cost for what you are actually using inside the cloud. But during this entire journey, because of the complicated nature of the cloud, so once you are on the cloud, you are spending a number of services of the cloud and ultimately you find yourself lost in the cloud operating cost model.

So this is where the FinOps come into the picture. Most of the customer I’ve worked with, are struggling with establishing the different controls and measures on their cloud operational costs. So essentially, it helps the customer to bring the cloud cost controls whenever they are operating any kind of workload on the cloud. Now, this is why the FinOps is important.

Now, coming on to the core pillars of the FinOps, so there are six different principles of the FinOps. Let us start with the collaboration. So similar to DevOps, within the FinOps, we try to avoid any kind of silos between different teams and different stakeholders who are essentially the key decision makers in the FinOps model. So there are different teams. There is a finance team and there is your engineering team who are mainly focusing on building products and services for your customers.

Then there is a business team whose key focus is on the return on investment. So you try to break down the silos between all these stakeholders. Then you try to create different kinds of controls and measures and bring in the visibility on your cloud expenses so that as a team, this team can help you to identify the areas where the cloud cost is being spent and then also to identify the different kinds of measures that we can put in place to establish control over your cloud cost.

Then business value-driven cloud decisions. So we try to make every decision a data-driven decision. So let’s try to understand it with an example. As a company owner, you might be using the cloud and you might be spending millions of dollars on your cloud on a monthly basis or maybe on an annual basis.

So you don’t know how much return you are actually getting out of that particular cloud platform. So the cloud could be a part of your business. You could be an entire business process. You could be an e-commerce store, that uses a cloud platform to run your digital solutions, your e-commerce web portal, your mobile applications, API, and a number of things. Ultimately cloud is not your service offering, but it is a platform that helps you run your digital platforms.

You actually don’t have any kind of visibility of how much you are spending and how much ROI you are getting from that particular cost. So you need to understand that you are generating your revenue from your business and you are spending certain money on the cloud and how both are linked. So how much money you are spending how much actually is being converted into the business and what kind of return or revenue you are getting out of it. You need to understand this entire cycle. Only then you can make better decisions about how much you should keep on spending on the cloud or maybe you need to optimize your cloud operational cost.

Then accountability. So in most companies, the accountability mostly lies with the finance team or it’s the CFO who is constantly measuring the different operational costs and maybe trying to struggle to control those kinds of costs. The engineering team, like I said, they are always focused on delivering great performing products, but they are hardly concerned about the operational cost. Right.

So accountability tells you that every single person who is utilizing maybe the complete part or maybe some part or some services in the cloud should be accountable for running their workload on the cloud. That is only possible when you start first creating the visibility that this is what you are using inside the cloud and this is how much it is costing.

So first you need to give that kind of visibility. And only after that, you can make the decision. So the next step is to make them accountable for the individual cost. So if the engineering team is running, let’s say, a particular product, they should be accountable for the entire cloud cost that is occurring because of that particular product.

Let’s suppose your marketing team is running your public website. And again, maybe there are certain other stakeholders who are running some other solutions on the cloud. So you need to make every single person accountable for their individual application and the associated cloud cost.

The next is accessible and timely reporting. So the BI gives you different kinds of reports and insights about your business, about your organization. A similar philosophy for creating insightful reports is also an essential part of FinOps. You need to create certain reports that you can share with your different stakeholders, maybe on a monthly basis.

Now, those reports could be created in different formats. So you need to create a report. So for the engineering team, the report can be created, let’s say, these are the services that you are using, and you can correlate it with the different application components.

The front end might cost X amount, the back end might cost Y amount. Your 10 different APIs might be costing ABC amount individually tagged with each of the APIs. Now for the marketing team, you can tell them that the last time you ran certain marketing campaigns, right? So the entire monthly amount on those marketing campaigns was X amount. And then they can correlate it with how much business they’ve actually generated, how many transactions they have actually been able to execute through those campaigns.

So you need to give relevant reports with the relevant insight to all these stakeholders. So for business executives, it could be related to the performance of a particular team, the performance of a particular client, performance of a particular project. For the engineering team, it should be mapped with their individual project. So you need to give relevant reports with the relevant insight to all these stakeholders.

Then you also need to form a centralized team that is dedicated to FinOps. And again, when we say dedicated, that does not mean that you need to hire certain specific people and you need to increase your headcount. When we say dedicated people, that means some stakeholders identified in your company, but they are constantly focusing on establishing the FinOps practices.

They would be constantly monitoring the entire cloud cost. They will be constantly monitoring the different kinds of reports that we are publishing on a monthly basis. And whatever actions need to be taken to constantly optimize your operational costs.

So this will be a continuous focus for the centralized team, right? So the benefit is over the period of time, they will be also able to understand that what exactly we are doing and how much cloud cost efficiency we are bringing into it. They will also act as a centralized team that can create certain best practices and they can also enforce the other teams or departments to stick to the best practices that are being defined at the organizational level.

The last is to utilize the variable cloud cost model. So you know that the cloud works on pay-as-you-go or pay for what you have used kind of models. You don’t have to invest the entire cost upfront. Instead, you first identify which service you want to use in what capacity, and the capacity is also flexible.

You can change your cloud service utilization maybe on a daily basis. You can adjust your capacity of the cloud. You can upgrade or downgrade your infrastructure. And accordingly, your cost will be also a variable component, right? But while you are making these decisions, you also need to make sure that there are different services that runs in different cost models, right?

So you need to have a good understanding of all these services. For example, your engineering team might be just using on-demand instances, right? Now you need to tell them that you can run this similar kind of workload. Maybe instead of using a scalable pool of on-demand instances, you can also start using spot instances, right?

They will give you an almost similar kind of performance, but the operational cost will be significantly lower. So that kind of insight again needs to be passed on to different teams who are using different services. And again, you need to make the decisions accordingly. So if you start working on your FinOps journey, these are the core six principles of FinOps that you need to follow.

Anmol: Okay. I think that was a thorough breakdown. Thank you for that, Gaurav. And it’s really fascinating how FinOps requires such a cultural shift within organizations.

Let’s say moving from those traditional silos to a more collaborative approach. It really sounds like it’s not just about saving costs, but also maximizing the cloud’s business value.

Now let’s dive a bit deeper into the organizational aspect. So how can FinOps help the executive team gain proper visibility about their cloud spend?

Providing cloud cost visibility to executive teams

Gaurav: Right. So. On the visibility side, there are three different phases in the FinOps, right? It starts with the inform, then optimize, and then operate. Let’s try to understand.

So first you need to tell your different stakeholders, this is what you are using. And this is how much we are spending on the cloud in order to run these services. So as of now, your business executive team might not be aware. Let’s suppose there are 10 different departments, 10 different projects, and 10 different customers. So these business focus areas could be different. For a service company, it could be different customers. For a product company, it could be, let’s suppose, different products that are there in the product portfolio.

So first you need to identify what is important for the business executives from a business point of view or the service offering point of view.

Then you need to first inform the executive team. And as is the state. So as of date, you are running, let’s say, 10 different projects, right? So how many active projects you are running as of date? And for all those 10 projects, how much cost you are incurring on the cloud. So those kinds of visibility you first need to provide to your executive team through different kinds of reports, through different kinds of dashboards. But again, it will start with identifying the right business focus areas.

Then the second one is optimized. So once you inform the executive team about this particular part, then you move to the second step which is optimization. Now, this optimization is simply taking direct action without needing anything on the engineering side.

For example, when you tell your executive team that these are 10 different projects and the cost associated with each project is X, Y, Z. Now if they tell you that. Project number 10 is no longer required. So you can immediately shut down the infrastructure required for Project 10. Or let’s suppose they tell you that in project number five, the UAT is somehow paused for let’s say next two months.

So you can immediately suspend the infrastructure associated with that particular project or maybe temporarily. You can put all the resources in a stop state. Now, like I told you the cloud gives you the flexibility that you at any point in time. You can start using new services or you can suspend a particular service. So it’s an as-you-go or pay-on-demand service. So you need to be very careful about what services are actually required at any one point in time.

So all the direct actions that are derived from the inform phase, you can invoke in the optimize phase. The third part is the operation. So during the operate, you make all these things as a continuous service. So you create certain processes where every month you start publishing those kinds of reports.

And then again, every month you pick up certain actions that can be directly taken. And then you can define certain processes and habits. For example, whenever there is a new project, you will create certain tax associated with those projects. So that from the next month onward, you can also add the billing reports of those projects to your monthly financial reports.

Anmol: It seems FinOps provides the lens through which executives can really see what’s going on with their dollars spent on the cloud. But visibility is just one part of the equation, right? So how can we enable the leaders to take necessary actions to optimize or channel their investments in the cloud?

Driving cloud cost optimization through executive enablement

Gaurav: So FinOps is incomplete if you only talk about bringing in the information. Visibility through reports, right? So the heart of FinOps is how you can actually save your cloud operational cost, right? So without optimizing that particular cost, it will not make any sense neither for your different stakeholders or for your business executives, right?

So in order to enable your executive team to take necessary action, you first need to provide them certain mechanisms. So maybe you can create certain SOPs. For example, every month. Maybe every week. Every 15 days. You can set up certain regular reviews and monitoring meetings.

Now in those review meetings, we can always discuss what is going on currently and you can always set the right expectations between different stakeholders. Now in those meetings, different stakeholders can provide insight from their point of view and accordingly you can take what should be done on the cloud cost.

So I give you one example. where the business team can tell you that maybe the priority of a particular project is going low or maybe the portfolio of the customer is shrinking, right? And accordingly, we can also optimize our investment in the cloud infrastructure for that particular product, right?

Let’s suppose a particular customer tells you that the next month will be a lean period for us, right? So we’ll not be performing any kind of UAT testing. Maybe the entire team will be on the holidays. It could be a Christmas event, right? So you can create that. You can collect all those kinds of insights from different teams. And accordingly, you can give your infra team some instructions so that they can optimize their infrastructure cost.

Similarly, you can also identify that if there is a customer who has made a business contract for, let’s say, two years or three years, then again, we can take a decision. Can we make certain commitments on the infrastructure side?

So whether it is AWS cloud or GCP cloud. So all the clouds offer you a different kind of operating model where if you make certain commitments on the utilization of the infrastructure, they give you very heavy discounting. But again, it requires a certain commitment to the utilization of the services. And that you can only make when you also have the similar kind of commitment from your customer side.

Now, all these kinds of points can be discussed in those kinds of review meetings. And you can help your business executives to understand all those parameters and how meaningful they are. So meaningful actions or insights can be driven through those kind of meetings.

Then the next one is governance and policy enforcement. So you can also define certain governing policies. For example, for every project, you can make project managers accountable so that they can set certain budgets. They can set certain alarms depending on the operating cost projections at the beginning of the month. So that whenever they are operating because of any reason, if there is any spike or any breach of the defined budgets, they should be notified. And there should be clearly defined action that in case they receive such kind of notification, what action needs to be taken by them.

For example, they can look into the insight that which service is breaching my previously defined budget. And accordingly, they can look into the issue, whether it is a genuine business spike or something is not working right. Or maybe it is a service-level issue. Or maybe something is not working. Or maybe someone accidentally has launched certain additional services. So these kind of SOPs can be defined for different stakeholders. Again, we can define certain documented governance and policies, which can be referred to by the rest of the stakeholders in their day-to-day activities.

Anmol: That’s right, Gaurav. I think actionable insights are indeed crucial for decision-making. After all, it’s all about giving executives the tools they need. Not just see the numbers, but also understand and manage them effectively. Speaking of effectiveness, I am curious about the tangible outcomes of these practices. It would be great if you could share some real-world case studies where FinOps led to significant cost savings.

Gaurav: So the end objective of FinOps is always to provide different means so that we can control the cloud operational cost. From a business executive point of view, providing actionable insight means whatever the data we are presenting in terms of FinOps reports, it should provide them meaningful insights so that they can actually identify that this action needs to be taken on a particular area, which can further lead to optimization of the cloud cost.

And again, we are not saying it’s just the reduction of the cloud cost. Sometimes you have to shift your cloud cost from one business unit to another business unit so that you can improvise or maximize your return on investment.

So in some of the cases, it will be a direct reduction of the cost. In some ways, it is the optimization of the cost from one part or one service from one account, one project to another, so that you can improvise your return on investment.

If I give you some examples from our past experience, one of the customers with whom we have been working for the last many years is named Chalo, it is a public transport tracking application that streams the real-time location of public transport vehicles, which are generally state-operated buses.

So they’ve onboarded multiple cities, and in every state, they are making agreements with the state governments, where they are first onboarding the entire fleet of these state-operated buses onto this particular platform. And after that, they are trying to provide Uber and Ola kind of experience to the end user.

So anyone who is commuting using city buses can use this particular application. If you are standing on a bus spot, you can use their mobile application, and you can see the city bus arriving at a particular bus spot in real time. So this kind of experience they are providing to the end consumer through this particular platform.

So now they have registered more than 15,000 public buses across India, and they have covered more than 17 cities. So you can assume that what kind of traffic they would be having on their platform. So if I look at their journey, they have just started from a couple of cities, and the number of users was less, and the initial downloads were less when they were new in the market.

So they started with a simple VM-based cloud ecosystem, and gradually they expanded their platform, they gradually onboarded multiple cities, and their platform kept on growing for the last several years. So their cloud expenses also grown significantly.

So initially they were running under a startup model with the cloud service provider. So up to a certain duration, they also receive free benefits from the cloud service provider.

But beyond that, their cloud operational cost increased to a big volume. So in this entire journey, what we observed was that initially, the entire focus was on the customer experience. How we can establish our product in the market, was the sole focus. So they were not much bothered about the infrastructure cost, the marketing cost, and that kind of thing.

But when you reach a certain stage, then you have to look into the triage of the business is cost experience and the return on investment. So at a certain point in time, they were completely lost from the cloud. So they were just getting the big amount of the cloud operational cost every month, and they were using multiple cloud services. But they were completely clueless about the areas where we could optimize our cost. So whenever they were onboarding a new city, they were creating a separate set of infrastructure, and the cost was growing big.

And in this kind of model, when you offer these kinds of services to the state government, so of course your share in the revenue is, is significantly small, right? So at a particular point in time, you need to strike a balance between your investment versus the revenue you are getting from this particular service.

So we help the customer to first identify that what are the important cost centers for them. So for them, the important cost center is every state, because they have business agreements and contractual agreements, operational rates, and all those kinds of things. So they are different from state to state. So whatever, the agreement they are doing with the state might not be similar for the other state.

So what we suggested them that let’s start tagging your entire infrastructure from city to city point of view so that you can adjust how much cost you are getting from one kind of city and what kind of performance, maximum performance we can offer to the end consumer staying within those business limits.

So this is how we started scaling. We started creating segregation between the entire infrastructure. We also discussed what is your pilot period. So it’s not the day one when you go live with the entire platform for a new city or a new state. So whenever they onboard a new state, even within that particular state, they gradually onboard each city one by one.So when they onboard one particular city again within a city, they onboard different buses one by one, right? And this is the gradual approach that they were following.

So what we suggested is that instead of going large with the entire infrastructure, let’s start with an onboarding kind of infrastructure, which we can run with a smaller capacity and smaller configuration, and maybe we can control the onboarding cost. When you are done with the onboarding of the entire fleet, maybe then we can add additional resources to take care of the production traffic that is coming to your platform.

So these kind of decisions, we were able to execute these only when we provided these kinds of insight to their business executive team. Previous to that, they were completely clueless. So it rarely happens that business executive teams sit with the infrastructure team. But in the cloud era, we can make this happen with the FinOps approaches.

And believe me, we were able to save a cost of 18% over the period of six to eight months. And their annual cloud spend was around 500 million US dollars. So you can just imagine how much cost saving we brought to the table by the FinOps practices.

Anmol: Right. So that was an impressive example with impressive figures. It really underlines the impact of FinOps on an organization’s bottom line. It’s impressive to see how these strategies can lead to tangible results. But as we know, change isn’t always smooth. What are some common hurdles companies face when adopting FinOps? And how can they overcome those challenges?

Overcoming FinOps challenges: Mindset, visibility & continuity

Gaurav: So I believe the biggest hurdle is the mindset, right? Everything is in front of you. Whatever you are spending, of course, in the cloud, the billing model works in a monthly invoicing model. So at the end of the month, you receive an invoice for all these services or all the infrastructure that you have used. So you have access to the entire data, how much you are paying on a monthly basis, and how much revenue you are generating. But the biggest hurdle is you are missing the connecting bridge. You don’t know how to map the different business components within the cloud. So split the cost and visibility into the data. This is the biggest hurdle.

Without those insights, even if you are aware of the situation that ultimately you are incurring losses, you cannot make any decisions. You cannot simply reach out to your cloud operational team and you cannot tell them that shut down these two instances without knowing the impact of the same.
And this is something that you want to leave to the infrastructure team on how they want to optimize. But ultimately, what are the areas where you want to bring down your operational costs? This is a business decision.

So the first hurdle is the visibility of the data, the missing insightful reports. So you always have the monthly invoice, but the invoice only tells you that you have consumed these services in this much capacity and this much amount we have to pay. But no cloud gives you the report, which actually tells you that out of all the business cost centers. These particular cost centers cost you X amount of the entire operational cost rate.

So this is something where they need the help of some expert who can sit with the customers, understand their business cost centers, help them to tag and classify their entire cloud infrastructure into those business cost centers, and provide them the invoice, which is different from the default invoice.

So we generally call them customers. So these are the custom billing reports that we typically create for our customers. Now, with the help of those custom billing reports, the business executives are able to understand the different distribution of the cloud cost in which department or in which particular business unit, and how much they are spending on the cloud.

So just to understand, let’s suppose if I’m running a company, I’m getting one monthly invoice on AWS. So AWS doesn’t just tell me that you are using 10 different servers and two databases. Some storage services and this is your total operational cost. Let’s assume that it is 25,000 US dollars. Right now, I know that it is a costly affair for me, and if I want to reduce my cost, I don’t know that how much of this entire cost is being consumed by which department for me, what matters is I know that marketing team is something which is generating business for me.

So even if I am spending a certain amount on my marketing team, it will in the long term, it will give me a certain return on investment. But let’s suppose I’m completely unaware that there are a couple of applications that are being used by the HR department. Now, the HR team is not generating any kind of revenue for me. So if I have to first reach out to any team to reduce my cloud operational cost, it will be those teams that are not directly generating any kind of revenue for me. So first I need that data, which clearly tells me that out of 25,000 US dollars, your 15% cost is being spent on HR applications. The rest is being spent on the marketing team, development team, X, Y, Z.

After having this visibility, I may be able to understand why we are spending this much amount on the HR application, and what kind of application we are running on the cloud, which are consuming this much of cost. And then maybe it can lead me to further decision-making to either stop those services or maybe to opt out for cheaper third-party services or maybe whatever the possible instances are. So the first step is that I need to know the cost.

So the first hurdle is to understand your cost breakdown. The second one is to get meaningful insight where you can take action. The third one is the blocker I believe in FinOps is how you can actually make this process continuous. So most of the company begin their FinOps journey, and they are excited about it. And initially, they are able to achieve certain cost optimization by themselves. And then after a certain amount. But after a period of time, they again get back on the initial track. They started focusing on the business part. The team they have onboarded to perform the FinOps activity again diluted and everyone goes back to the initial track.

So we have to make it a continuous habit that even beyond a particular limit if we are not able to achieve further cost optimization, we should constantly focus on the FinOps practices to improvise. So that at least if you are not able to achieve additional cost savings, we can at least keep control of the ongoing operational cost.

So not letting your operational cost increase or not letting your cloud cost increase is also one kind of saving. So you can make it a habit for the entire team and it should be in your DNA that whenever you are adding a new service, whenever you are launching new infrastructure on the cloud, it should always be vetted and approved by all these teams.

Whether it is your stakeholders, whether it is your finance team, business team, why it is important, how much it is important. And we should be aware that there is a limit in terms of performance and this is where we need to stop.

Anmol: Great insights, Gaurav. I think it’s reassuring to hear that there are strategies to navigate these hurdles. And I would agree that having the right mindset and tools goes a long way in smoothing out the FinOps adoption process. Now, if we look ahead, like as per you, what does the future look like for FinOps? So the future of FinOps is quite promising.

Future of FinOps: The path to smarter cloud usage

Gaurav: Even if you look at the last decade, most of the companies have already migrated to the cloud and some companies are still under the migration part, where either the entire application or some of their workloads are running in the cloud. And I’m again talking about both public and private companies. So in the next few years, cloud utilization by all companies is going to increase for sure.

Nowadays, even companies are exploring the hybrid approach where instead of just using one cloud, they are using multiple clouds and some part of their application is on one cloud, and the rest of the part they are running on multiple clouds. So with this scattered approach, they are again trying to bring in efficiency in terms of better performance. But again, they are also struggling to manage the cloud cost in this particular hybrid model.

So there are some reports and data available that state that more than 20% of the cloud cost is being wasted by most of the company. So why this particular cost is being wasted? Sometimes what happens is that you increase your infrastructure or let’s suppose you use a particular service, which after a period of time is no longer required. So some of the examples are, let’s say there is unused elastic block storage lying in your account and you are not aware of it.

It is not directly impacting any of your applications, but it’s like you are completely unaware of it. Similarly, there are certain elastic IPs that are not being used. You might have defined certain auto-scaling policies in your account and it was required maybe at a particular period of time. But again, with the change. So the data that the cloud uses, patent, might not be required anymore. So you need to look into those kinds of data and most of the companies are not paying attention to those areas.

And that is why they end up wasting a lot of their resources and paying for those services which they are not using. One of the classical examples is in the last five to six years, many companies have created a large pool of data in the cloud. It could be the end customer uploaded data or it could be their application data.

But honestly speaking, 80% of the data is not required in real-time. One of the examples is when you download your banking statement. So typically the banking application does not allow you to download the statement beyond 12 months. So it’s not that they have lost your data, but they know that that particular data is not frequently required.

So again, you need to identify those kinds of use cases. And accordingly, you can take certain steps. For example, maybe you can archive the historical data. And again, there are different types of storage services being provided. There are different types of storage classes are being provided by the different cloud service providers. So you need to look at your data, look at your business use cases. And accordingly, you need to make a decision that let’s start using a different type of storage class for one particular set of data, which is not required or maybe we can archive a particular data.

So understanding the different kinds of services offered by the cloud and whether your business is using the right service at the right point of time in the right capacity or not. That is the key point for the FinOps. So this is a continuous habit and it is required.

Most of the companies, believe me, are struggling. They don’t have any insight. They are completely clueless, even if they are making certain decisions. So those are surface-level decisions. So if you look from an engineering perspective, the DB, again, whenever they are making any kind of changes or if the developer, if they are writing any kind of code. So they are completely unaware that how much cost, how much infrastructure cost is going to increase, was the commitment of that particular code. So that particular piece of code may start utilizing more RAM or more CPU and ultimately it will increase the operational cost.

So in every department, in all these stakeholders, this kind of visibility is not there, at least in the current state of the FinOps. And that is why I believe that FinOps, once we actually disclose the true power of the FinOps, when we provide this kind of visibility to your engineering team, to your business executive team, to your finance team, then they will actually realize that how much they could have saved in the past, or at least how much they can save now onwards. It will automatically define the importance of that. It will also define the importance of the FinOps for everyone.

Anmol: Yeah, and I think it’s exciting to think about the role of advancing technology in the evolution of FinOps. With the cloud becoming even more integral to business operations, the expertise and the approaches you have described are likely to become even more valuable. Thank you for sharing your insights with us today, Gaurav.

It’s been an enlightening conversation. And I’m sure our listeners will find it equally valuable as they navigate their cloud financial management journeys.

Final Thoughts: FinOps as a business differentiator

Gaurav: Thanks, Anmol. I’m always excited to talk more about FinOps because of my experience whenever we sit with the customer, and the excitement that we see on the face of the customer, specifically the business executive from the customer side. So they wondered if these are the immediate activities that they can perform. It’s not like a business plan that they need to first work on. And after that, they have to wait for the success or result of it. It’s the direct action that they can take based on the data.

So just providing them with this kind of visibility and helping them to achieve this kind of efficiency, always brings excitement for all the stakeholders. And this is the best part. And we are always excited to talk more about it.

Anmol: We’ll definitely have you back for another engaging discussion. And to our listeners, that’s a wrap for today’s episode. I hope today’s discussion has broadened your horizon of knowledge on integrating financial accountability with technological operations.

The journey towards financial intelligence and operational excellence may seem complex, but with the right approach knowledge, and expertise, it’s definitely achievable. Remember, the cloud is not just a cost center. It’s a powerful driver of innovation and growth when managed wisely. Embrace the principles of FinOps, and you’ll be on your way to making every dollar count.

So if you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast so that you never miss out on the latest tech insights. We would love to hear your thoughts. And we’ll see you in the next episode. Until then, keep listening to the Unthinkable Tech Podcast.