Avoiding The Finops Cloud Migration Misconceptions

What is FinOps?

FinOps is a term that has gained tremendous popularity in recent years; in the last year or so, every organization in the world has been discussing FinOps and Cost Optimization in the cloud. FinOps is a cultural practice. FinOps is a cultural practice as well as a financial one. It is how teams manage their cloud costs, with everyone responsible for their cloud usage and a major best-practices group providing support. FinOps integrates business, finance, and technology to optimize the administration of cloud vendors.

Why is FinOps adoption growing?

The adoption of cloud-native infrastructure services has accelerated the growth of public cloud expenditure over the past few years. As a result, FinOps has emerged as the management discipline for organizations seeking to optimize costs by implementing best practices designed to maximize cloud investment returns. In simpler terms, this means that a company must acquire in-depth knowledge of the financial management of the public, private, or hybrid cloud platform before migrating there, adhere to best practices, and align its IT and finance goals before and after the migration journey to have greater control over its cloud costs.

Implementation of FinOps:

FinOps, when implemented effectively, does more than realign organizational priorities. It provides enterprises with distinct cloud financial management capabilities. For a successful implementation, businesses must document the qualitative aspects of migration. The qualitative aspects of migration are essential for determining which duties can and should be migrated. Typically, these workloads are migrated in phases, each being scoped out based on the conclusions reached during this crucial phase of business case planning.

This blog will discuss how to avoid various misunderstandings when implementing finOps.

Misconception 1: The financial forecasts must demonstrate that the cloud is less costly than the legacy data center infrastructure.

Despite the possibility that cloud computing offers cost savings, cost savings are only sometimes the only business justification for cloud migration. A more holistic approach is required to consider the total business value, including revenue and expense. In scenarios where cloud costs are anticipated to be higher than those of legacy environments, the potential range of these revenue enhancements should be evaluated against the cloud’s projected costs to determine the cloud’s anticipated return on investment.

Misconception 2: The cloud’s financial benefits must be realized within one year for the migration to be justified.

Migrations from legacy environments to the cloud require time and resources. Although some businesses recognize financial benefits from their cloud migration in less than a year, it is more common for most business value to be realized after this period. Whether the objectives of the migration are cost reduction, revenue enhancement, or other benefits, decision-makers should have a time horizon of at least two to three years to realize these benefits. Once this transitional period concludes, businesses will experience lower costs, higher revenues, or a combination of the two for many years, courtesy of their new cloud technologies.

Misconception 3: The financial model should compare the on­premises environment’s total cost of ownership to the anticipated cloud cost.

In contrast to cloud environments, most on-premise environments incur upfront capital expenditures that are expensed as depreciation over time.

Theoretically, the “total cost” of the on-premise infrastructure would consist of non-cash expenses such as depreciation and amortization and out-the-door cash costs such as maintenance and support contracts, facility leases, and electricity. Instead of a “TCO comparison,” the financial model should be a cash-based analysis comparing the cash cost avoidance in the data center to the costs incurred in the cloud.

Misconception 4: The business case is complete once the decision to migrate has been made.

While migration is in progress, alterations may occur. New products and services may present opportunities for capturing additional value. And even when migration plans remain relatively consistent, it is essential that businesses perpetually reevaluate actual outcomes against their predictions so that projections for subsequent migration waves can be adjusted as needed. With each phase of the migration, a variance analysis must be conducted so that the underlying causes of any discrepancies can be identified and future waves can benefit from the knowledge gained. The qualitative and quantitative sections of the business case are living documents that are perpetually revised until the completion of the migration.

Conclusion:

Moving to the cloud can transform a business. As organizations continue to invest in cloud services, FinOps becomes an increasingly vital discipline. FinOps provides teams with a method for making more informed cloud investments and ensuring that these investments produce the highest possible business value. By generating a thorough business case with a strong emphasis on qualitative factors, enterprises can ensure a successful migration of workloads that are best positioned to benefit from the cloud.

Implementing a FinOps strategy in your organization represents a cultural shift. Partner with the right managed FinOps services provider to ensure your cloud FinOps financial governance is always on track. iVedha offers the expertise and personnel needed to expedite the adoption of cloud-based financial management procedures. Our cloud platform enables you to monitor, manage, and forecast your cloud expenditures across multiple cloud and software providers. Contact our experts for more information.