Cloud adoption has been on an upward trajectory for over a decade with no signs of slowing down. As widescale migration becomes the norm, organizations are realizing cloud financial management — also referred to as FinOps — is critical to creating long term value in the cloud. Building a culture of financial discipline requires visibility and a strategy for measuring success along the way.

Achieving cost savings is one of the main drivers for cloud adoption. But for most companies, controlling cloud spend is much more challenging than anticipated. In a recent survey, 94% of IT decision makers report they are overspending in the cloud. Our own survey on cloud costs revealed 90% of executives say better cloud cost management and cost reduction is a top priority.

Cloud services are the number one source of unexpected overspending for companies today. As a result, cloud financial management is a major focus for most organizations. But how do you track the success of cloud efficiency? Full allocation of multicloud costs is a critical component for understanding your actual cloud services usage, establishing cloud cost management ownership, and creating accurate budgets and forecasts at the line of business, project, application and even team levels.

As a member of the FinOps organization, Anodot is excited to sponsor the upcoming FinOps X event in Austin, TX. Anodot’s mission has always been to help organizations solve one of the most recognized challenges associated with public cloud adoption — cost control and optimization. Every feature of our Anodot cloud cost management platform has been built by taking a core FinOps market concern and working backward to deliver a capability that fills that need.

Given the strategic importance of the cloud and size of cloud expenditures, it’s critical for enterprises to have solid controls in place to manage it all. According to our latest research, however, while most organizations agree with that sentiment, very few have put it into practice. There are distinct but related disciplines that come into play: FinOps and cloud governance. In this two-part series, we explore current state of each.

The FinOps position, for most SaaS companies, is a relatively recent addition to the team. FinOps acts as a liaison between the Finance and Engineering teams, with the goal of getting everyone on the same page (and speaking the same language) when it comes to setting, optimizing, and sticking to budgets. FinOps and engineering have a special relationship, because engineers are the ones who ultimately make major infrastructure, development, and design choices that impact the cloud bill.

We’re thrilled to announce that Spot by NetApp has joined The FinOps Foundation as a Premier Member! Joining the FinOps Foundation is a natural extension of Spot by NetApp’s mission to help companies to get the most out of their cloud investments through world-class CloudOps. The FinOps Foundation is a non-profit technology consortium focused on advancing the people and practice of cloud financial management through best practices, education, and standards.

While Financial Operations (FinOps) isn’t a new concept, it is becoming more prevalent in companies that have started seeing increases in their cloud spend. Historically, when engineers needed to set up infrastructure to complete a project, they had to go through a long process of procuring servers, finding space in a data center, and getting financial approval. This process could take two months or more, so it allowed plenty of time for oversight by the financial department.