In recent years, traditional financial services companies have increasingly come under attack from fast-moving financial technology firms—or “fintechs”—which use software to erode the market share of their competition.
When I first got involved in the cloud space back in 2015 the first thing I was tasked with was talking to our engineers, learning about networking, IT and general DevOps concepts. This allowed me to better understand the cloud, conduct research and provide solutions to our customers and partners.
Although, for many, the rallying cry for the move to cloud computing is cost savings, yet unless actual cloud costs are understood and managed, is entirely possible to lose money in a cloud environment. Cloud Financial Management, FinOps for short, is the inclusion of financial accountability in operational practices. Understanding the variability and source of cloud costs allows teams to make appropriate business trade-offs between speed, cost, and quality.
As usage-based pricing models have continued to increase over the past decade, particularly for technology companies, there has been a major shift in budget planning and resource allocation. Since CFOs can no longer predict or approve each and every expense before they’re incurred, variations in usage costs can often make or break a company’s profitability. For example, two of the most common usage-based costs come from online advertising and IT-related cloud costs.
As fintech solutions have proliferated in the financial service industry, one of the emerging keys to growing a customer base is to have the best customer experience. For services connecting with customers using digital access points such as web or mobile applications, this means monitoring the experience of users in real time and responding as quickly as possible when errors happen.
Hear how financial service providers Deutsche Bank and Stash use Humio log management to gain system-wide observability at our Financial Services Roundtable co-hosted by IBM.
Organizations that provide financial services and fintech companies experience constant pressure from customers, regulators, and competitors to increase the speed and quality of their services. For those organizations making the move to the cloud, there are additional layers of complexity arising from microservices in containers.
The FinOps journey’s third phase, “Operate”, is the last step in the FinOps cycle. But it is by no means the end. The first phase of the FinOps journey, Inform, is about gaining visibility into your cloud operations and creating accountability. Next, the Optimize phase focuses on discovering ways to optimize cloud services and resources, and creating frameworks designed to make spend more efficient.
The financial services industry has built in more capital buffers to prevent market shocks from bringing another economic collapse. In addition to these financial controls, many banks and personal trading platforms have begun building resiliency into information technology shocks. Despite these new precautions, we’re still seeing outages today, preventing customers from depositing and withdrawing their money, completing transactions, and executing trades during key events.
FinOps has three iterative phases: Inform, Optimize, and Operate. In the first part of this blog series, we discussed how the “Inform” phase is all about achieving visibility for resource allocation and creating accountability over the organization’s cloud spending. In this article, we will focus on the “Optimize” phase, and explore how it impacts your FinOps journey and the entire cloud spend optimization plans.
