Many enterprises have already become proficient with the cloud. They’ve migrated a substantial portion of their workloads, learned the necessary cloud skills, established an aggressive security posture, and developed at least an initial workable operating model. What’s next? How do you build on that foundation to maximize the value of the cloud? Here are some suggestions.
In the cloud, financial management is a continuous process. You control your costs through ongoing adjustments, with many Cost-reduction levers available. The discipline of Cloud FinOps supplies practices you need to become mature in financial management. Among other factors, you’ll want to make decisions about how to allocate Cost management responsibilities. For example, technologists—generally working in distributed teams—can often architect their systems to reduce their operational costs. They can learn to treat cost as just one more engineering parameter to optimize. Centralized financial oversight teams, on the other hand, are in a good position to negotiate supplier agreements with the aggregated purchasing power of the entire organization, make decisions or recommendations on using reserved instances and savings plans, and provide the entire enterprise with visibility into costs.
It’s not just about costs. With cloud resource tagging strategies, you can gain insight into the economics of your business and your digital interactions with customers. Essentially, you can slice and dice your costs to a tiny granularity and examine how customers are using the digital features you offer. In an earlier blog post, we even talked about doing activity-based costing within your digital transactions to get unprecedented insight into your unit economics.
Some additional resources: Unlocking the Business Value of Machine Learning—With Organizational Learning; Strategy for Efficient Cloud Cost Management; Financial Liberation: Taking Control of Costs in the Cloud; FinDev and Serverless Microeconomics: Part 1; FinDev and Serverless Microeconomics: Part 2—Impacts; Introducing FinOps—Excuse Me, DevSecFinBizOps; Micro-Optimization: Activity-Based Costing for Digital Services?; Decisions at the Margins
Similarly, you can do a lot to manage your carbon footprint—in fact, doing so often overlaps with your cost optimizations, since when you reduce by making your computing more efficient, you’re usually also reducing your carbon emissions. Once again, engineering and architectural decisions made by your technologists play a role in determining your carbon footprint. Our Well-Architected Framework now includes a pillar on how to engineer for sustainability.
The cloud can play a role in many of your organization’s ESG (environmental, social, and governance) initiatives—in particular, you might want to look at issues around diversity equity, and inclusion (DEI) and areas where you can have an impact on the communities where you do business.
