FinOps on Azure
Maximize cloud business value for your organization by leveraging Azure products and services to implement FinOps best practices that can support cloud cost optimization.
Drive results throughout the crawl, walk, and run journey
Use Azure solutions to implement FinOps best practices throughout your crawl, walk, and run journey. Help your team grow in scale, scope, and complexity with a comprehensive set of Azure products and services that are flexible and reliable.
The inform phase is the first step in the FinOps journey. Begin by collecting data from various sources to gain insights into your cloud usage and spending patterns. In this phase, you’ll focus on reporting, anomaly detection, benchmarking, cost allocation, taxonomy, tags, forecasting, and budgeting. Use Azure products and services to:
- Estimate cloud costs with the Azure Pricing Calculator and Total Cost of Ownership Calculator (TCO).
- Empower teams to make informed business decisions with visibility into performance, costs, and anomalies with Microsoft Cost Management and Azure Advisor.
- Allocate costs with Azure Resource Manager by creating tags and account hierarchy.
- Use Microsoft Cost Management to report, benchmark, and forecast costs.
- Explore analytics with visuals and turn data into insights with Power BI.
- Utilize Azure Migrate to discover and assess on-premises resources to plan your migration and modernization.
The optimize phase is the second step in the FinOps journey. Identify and take action on opportunities to optimize your cloud spending while delivering the same level of performance based on the insights gained from the inform phase. In this phase, you’ll focus on KPI, outcomes, optimize usage, optimize rate, business cases. Use Azure products and services to:
- Implement Azure Advisor recommendations to improve cloud cost effectiveness, performance, reliability, and security.
- Optimize usage and rates by leveraging savings opportunities with Azure Hybrid Benefit, Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances, and Azure savings plan for compute.
The operate phase is the final step in the FinOps journey. Establish a framework for ongoing cloud cost management and cloud governance so your organization can maintain optimal cloud usage and cost efficiency over the long term. In this phase, you’ll focus on organizational and cultural adoption of FinOps best practices. Use Microsoft products and services to:
- Set guardrails throughout your resources to help ensure cloud compliance, avoid misconfigurations, and practice consistent resource governance with Azure Policy.
- Simplify and accelerate your cloud journey with insights from Azure Migrate and expert support from the Azure Migration and Modernization Program.
- Leverage the Cloud Adoption Framework and Well-Architected Framework to adopt best practices to improve your cloud journey.
- Enable your team to learn new skills to boost productivity by using Microsoft Certifications.
- Promote team collaboration with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams.
Align FinOps with business needs and outcomes
Understand usage and costs
Allocate costs to specific teams or projects to encourage transparency, ownership, and accountability for cloud usage across the organization.
Benchmark and track performance
Establish and measure performance indicators that provide historical information to benchmark and forecast costs.
Make real-time decisions
Provide visibility into the costs of running workloads to enable teams to make fast, informed decisions that impact overall cost.
Optimize cloud rate and usage
Reduce costs by identifying inefficiencies and opportunities to purchase commitment-based discounts.
Related products
Microsoft Cost Management
Monitor, allocate, and optimize cloud costs with transparency, accuracy, and efficiency.
Azure Advisor
Your free, personalized guide to Azure best practices.
Azure Policy
Achieve real-time cloud compliance at scale with consistent resource governance.
Power BI
Bridge the gap between data and decisions with easy-to-use reports that appear wherever decisions are made.
Azure Migrate
Simplify migration and modernization with a unified platform.
Resources
FinOps with Azure: Bringing FinOps to life through organizational and cultural alignment
This e-book will guide you through the FinOps best practices and principles to highlight Microsoft solutions that support the cloud journey and help your organization to maximize cloud business value.
Frequently asked questions
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FinOps is a cultural practice designed to help organizations manage their cloud costs more effectively. It brings together finance, IT, engineering, and business teams to collaborate on optimizing cloud spending to achieve business goals. The goal of FinOps is to provide a framework that allows organizations to maximize cloud cost optimization and business value.
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The FinOps framework has three phases that organizations can use to implement FinOps practices and optimize their cloud financial management. These phases are inform, optimize and operate.
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The crawl, walk, run approach allows organizations to gradually mature their cloud cost management practices, building capabilities and expertise over time. By starting small and growing gradually, organizations can ensure that their FinOps practices are aligned with business goals to deliver maximum value to the organization.
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FinOps domains represent groups of activities or knowledge that guide organizations to successfully adopt FinOps best practices.
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FinOps capabilities are functional areas of activity that support FinOps domains.
These functional activities and processes are intended to be in service of enablement, education, knowledge sharing, advocacy, actionable tasks, business objectives, and FinOps maturity improvement. -
Yes, Microsoft is a premier member of the FinOps Foundation.