CIO OPINION understood workflows and a means to measure the ROI of actions taken .
This requires integration between the FinOps and DevOps tools used every day by engineers
Digitization has brought with it complexity and CIOs continue to face headaches when required to capture and report the return on investment ( ROI ) of cloud .
aid measures during lockdowns and intermittently as offices reopened in Australia .
The FinOps practice can be applied across each of these elements and can bring together a holistic management perspective , but it must be supported by the right solution to help teams manage across these different environments . and developers – making it seamless to action recommendations and measure realized savings . This is the main challenge burdening FinOps teams today as highlighted by the State of FinOps Report .
Ensuring organizational alignment also requires leaders and operational teams to have access to relevant information wherever and whenever they need it . Cloud cost management and optimization solutions must-have customizable reporting capabilities , with the ability to surface or hide information based on role or permissions .
Reports should be easily shared , provide up-to-date data and analytics and maintain granularity with full data retention across any time period to fully scale accountability across an organization .
Teams should also work together to establish key performance indicators ( KPIs ) to provide direction to decision-making that balances business objectives with infrastructure procurement decisions . Through this process , teams can agree on key trade-offs – like when to accept higher costs to accelerate a revenue-generating activity – and readily report back on outcomes .
Looking beyond IaaS
Cloud financial management is multi-faceted and to address only Infrastructure-As-a-Service ( IaaS ) ignores spend across key related areas . Financial management of a full cloud ecosystem must also contemplate non-IaaS spends , like Software-As-a- Service ( SaaS ) and on-prem commitments .
However , despite the inherent need to validate ROI , many CIOs and CTOs don ’ t have a clear view of all costs pertaining to SaaS and other applications that staff rely on – particularly those bought up as band-
In a recent pulse survey of CIOs and other technology decision-makers , 78 % are only in their first 12 months of establishing a granular model for managing cloud spend across increasingly complex business environments , with only a fraction beyond the oneyear mark .
What ’ s stopping Australian companies from getting this full view of their operations and spend ? The survey also showed organizations are predominately struggling with : availability and quality of the data they are analyzing ( 58 %), integration with other internal financial processes ( 50 %), decentralized or multiagency organizational structure ( 42 %), cultural change and skillset ( 33 %) and technical setup and perceived time-to-value ( 25 %).
CIOs need cloud financial management capabilities , and the ability to analyze , optimize and plan investments across the entirety of their technology portfolio , regardless of service type ( including infrastructure , platform or software ), provider , delivery model or deployment destination – across public
cloud , private cloud or on-premises .
The challenges of cloud are continuously evolving and expanding but are far outweighed by the feats teams are able to accomplish through its use . Smarter cloud spend and its on-going management provides a means of engaging boards , executives and other stakeholders in an informed , data-driven model to ensure business objectives are accelerated . p
Based in Brisbane , Australia , Ben Allard is Vice President and General Manager for Asia- Pacific at Apptio , a provider of cloud-based technology business management and IT financial management solutions .
46 INTELLIGENTCIO APAC www . intelligentcio . com