Why 60% of companies overpay for cloud services — and how to fix it with FinOps

Only 30% of executives can accurately answer the question of why their business consumes cloud resources. This is not fiction, but the results of a CloudZero study. It turned out that business owners often do not know which product, department, or client consumes the most computing power and money.

Furthermore, more than 60% of managers stated that their cloud service bills turned out to be higher than initially expected. At the same time, more and more organizations are virtualizing their external and internal services.

How to follow trends without spending extra money on cloud infrastructure? Regardless of whether you are a small startup or a large business, cost management is especially important. Here, the FinOps methodology, Financial Operations or Cloud Financial Operations, comes to the rescue, helping organizations use cloud resources most effectively and economically.

Sergey Bobko, Regional Development Manager at Servercore in Kazakhstan

In simple terms, the goal of FinOps is to "tie" computing power to money and account for the cost of IT infrastructure in the project budget.

The methodology allows engineers, accountants, and internal cloud users to understand how to properly distribute cloud architecture costs so that every invested tenge yields maximum return.

FinOps is not a role, but an approach. It is one of the ways of interaction between the CTO and CFO or similar executives.

When FinOps is needed

1. Your company actively uses cloud computing

If most of the infrastructure has been moved to the cloud or expenses are growing rapidly, it is easy to get unexpected bills without control. FinOps helps track, analyze, and optimize costs, increasing financial transparency.

2. Your company is about to undergo a series of structural changes

With business growth and dynamic financial indicators, manual control is no longer sufficient. Automated solutions allow for faster and more accurate cost management.

3. Your company is looking for a way to optimize business processes

Reducing infrastructure costs, turning off unused resources, moving data to cheaper storage — these are tasks that are effectively solved through the FinOps approach.

What is important to consider
— implementation requires time and team training
— there is currently a shortage of experienced FinOps specialists in the market
— the methodology needs to be tested gradually — you cannot blindly rely on model forecasts
— internal skepticism from employees is possible, so implementation should be phased.

FinOps is not a "magic button," but a tool for systematic management of cloud expenses that delivers results when properly integrated into business processes.

FinOps checklist: how to optimize resource consumption

1. Define goals

The motivation for implementing FinOps and the need for this methodology depends on the team and process maturity. Two main goals can be identified that organizations set for themselves.

Goal 1 — forecasting and calculating the consumption of current resources. This helps understand and control costs for cloud services.

Goal 2 — creating a culture of making economically justified decisions. The approach includes understanding costs and their impact on the business model. Based on this information, companies can make more balanced decisions.

If, for example, your current infrastructure costs are unsatisfactory and you understand that resources are in excess, look into FinOps. But do not rush into radical changes: implementing this methodology may require more money than you will "save." For example, if you realize that the infrastructure will need to be rebuilt, this can cause both temporary and material costs.

2. Get rid of obvious sources of costs

Suppose you have decided on changes and resource consumption optimization. This does not mean that you need to immediately build a department of FinOps specialists. If your infrastructure provider has billing monitoring, you can independently assess which resources you can do without. After that, consult with, for example, specialized specialists and make the final decision.

Only after you have eliminated unnecessary costs "on the surface" can you delve into the details if you need to improve the result.

3. Subordinate resource consumption

Set up and automate monitoring and analysis of processes running on the server. At this stage, you can already connect qualified FinOps specialists if you find them.

After you find out how much resources the installed applications consume, you can start optimizing. For this, you need to look at the monitoring data and understand which resources the server is not using to its full capacity, and take action. Let's consider specific technical recommendations.

Select the optimal configuration

Let's discuss this with the example of video cards. For initial tasks, it is not necessary to take the most top-tier GPUs. The same GTX 1080 is still relevant in inference tasks — on par with T4 and A2000. There are fewer CUDA cores, but they are all used by your server, and you do not overpay.

Reduce network consumption

Evaluate how much network data your server uses. Is it necessary to load everything through the network? Or is it better to load them once, cache them, and save on traffic?

These questions are especially relevant if you work with large volumes of data, such as datasets, and constantly download or upload them to the cloud. You can not only save budget but also time on this process by configuring data caching in the cluster. Servercore cloud provides 3 TB of external traffic for free, but if there is more, such analytics can be especially useful.

Utilize temporary resources

If you work with a large number of operational tasks — for example, application testing — configure the utilization of computing resources. These can be inactive pods, outdated replicas, residual logs, and even full processes that are not visible but run in the background in an idle state.

If monitoring, analysis, and resource consumption optimization itself become a regular ritual for your organization, then you can think about forming a responsible department. But remember: in FinOps, the goal must justify the means.