Understanding cloud costs
Understanding cloud costs helps organizations gain better control over their cloud usage.
In this FinOps realm, organizations collect all necessary information about cloud costs, usage, and other metrics. They standardize data formats from different sources, define how to allocate costs, and establish reporting methods. This process ensures that all relevant roles across the organization can use this data.
Organizations collect cloud usage data from cloud service providers and other service vendors. They also define and collect other relevant metrics, such as cost, utilization, and carbon emissions. They create organizational metadata to categorize, allocate, and summarize cloud cost and usage information.
This FinOps realm focuses on understanding and allocating cloud costs and usage within an organization. The information and insights from this realm can be applied to other realms and departments.
The capabilities in this realm help organizations achieve the following:
Identify, catalog, and obtain all important cloud cost and usage data.
Prioritize the use of the FOCUS dataset and standardize data from different data sources as needed.
Define allocation policies to map all costs back to internal cloud users.
Define methods and rules to allocate shared costs and resources.
Define unified reporting tools, parameters, and methods.
Define and distribute report data relevant to each role.
Understand and document the cloud usage and cost requirements of associated roles within the organization. These roles may span realms such as ITAM, ITIL, sustainability, and security.
This realm practices the following FinOps principles:
Everyone is responsible for cloud costs.
FinOps data is timely and accessible.
A central team drives FinOps.
Teams collaborate.
This realm helps organizations understand which cloud services they use, why they are incurring costs, and who is responsible for those costs. The activities in this realm continuously generate data that provides a current view of cloud usage and shows historical trends. This detailed data supports FinOps activities in other realms in a way that aligns with the organization's current maturity level.
This realm answers the following questions:
What resources do we use in the cloud?
How much do we spend on the cloud?
What is the impact of our cloud usage on carbon emissions and other metrics?
Who in the organization is responsible for cloud usage and costs?
How do all FinOps roles access this cloud usage and cost data?