Nicola Sfondrini, the Partner Digital and Cloud Strategy at PWC, emphasizes the growing importance of understanding cloud costs as a business-critical function. With a wide range of financial terms, measures, dimensions, and usage metrics available in various cloud service providers (CSPs) such as Azure, Amazon, and Google, there is a lack of a commonly accepted way to aggregate and present this data across multiple CSPs. The emergence of FinOps as a practice aims to bridge the gap between financial reporting and cloud services, advocating for software to help organizations manage and optimize their cloud costs.
The FinOps Foundation recently introduced the FinOps Open Cost Usage Specification (FOCUS) as a new standard for financial and usage accounting within the realm of cloud services. FOCUS acts as a common language for discussing cloud costs and usage, providing new chart translations and data allocations to establish a shared vocabulary for finance, engineering, and business decision-makers, aligning with key performance indicators. This standardization creates potential for increased emphasis on cloud cost data integrity across different CSPs, leading to technological innovations that simplify enterprise adoption of cloud services and enhance return on investments.
FOCUS revolutionizes cloud cost management by providing a standardized language for defining billing items, enabling companies to benchmark cloud bills more accurately and gain insights into their costs relative to industry standards. With the backing of industry giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, FOCUS aims to enhance billing transparency and democratize strategic cost management, shifting the task of cost management from organizations to end-users. This shift promotes a culture of financial responsibility and efficiency within organizations, signaling a critical turning point in the discourse around cloud costs.
By leveraging FOCUS, companies can improve their cloud cost management processes by implementing robotic process automation (RPA) tools to extract data from invoices, reconcile actual spending with budgeted forecasts, and generate comprehensive reports. Different stakeholders, including business or product owners, finance managers, FinOps practitioners, and engineers, can exploit the FOCUS framework to make informed budgetary decisions, conduct cost allocation and chargeback operations, optimize future financial planning, and prioritize efforts to optimize services with the most significant financial impact. FOCUS offers a scalable approach to collecting cost and usage data from the cloud, promoting financial transparency and control.
To promote the adoption of FOCUS, stakeholders are encouraged to engage in active dissemination and training sessions highlighting the benefits of managing cloud resources efficiently with FOCUS. Although challenges may arise, such as resistance to change and resource allocation for integration and training, addressing these hurdles through targeted communication and demonstrating long-term cost benefits can facilitate smoother adoption and maximize the impact of FOCUS in the evolving digital economy. The transformative potential of FOCUS in reshaping how organizations approach and manage their cloud expenditures represents a significant moment in the current and future landscape of cloud computing, fostering collaboration and innovation across the digital economy.
