Cloud FinOps, 2nd Edition

Chapter 20. Operate: Aligning Teams to Business Goals

Without a process for action, goals are never achieved. As you move into the operate phase of FinOps, you work to support and strengthen the elements identified in the previous two phases.

In this chapter, we look more broadly at processes and how they not only enable automation but also help organizations achieve their FinOps goals.

Achieving Goals

Whereas the optimize phase sets the goals, the operate phase takes action. New goals aren’t set here—this is where you make decisions and put plans into place to address the goals that have already been set, based on the business case and context.

Let’s take the concept of turning off resources out of hours—when not needed—and apply the correct order of operations. During the inform phase you identify the resources that could benefit from being turned off. In the optimize phase you measure the potential savings and set a target for how much you’d like to save based on these metrics. In the operate phase you define the process of turning resources on and off, and you can enable automation to increase the likelihood of the resources having the new process applied. This is the phase in which you introduce scalability and replication by defining processes that can be implemented across the whole organization.

The operate phase doesn’t always lead to action. If you think about the optimize phase as where you identify the opportunity for optimization and build the mini–business case ...