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Cloud financial operations focuses on capabilities that allow customers to evolve organizations, processes, automation and tools, and establish a self-sustaining cost-aware culture of innovation. This ensures that stakeholders across organizations have a common understanding of cloud costs, and can be done through establishing new working partnerships between finance and technology teams to allow more accurate budgeting and cloud spend monitoring. Reporting, education, gamification, and celebrating efficiency wins can drive organizational cost awareness and help foster a cost-aware culture.
We recommend establishing a centralized function (individual or team) that owns cloud financial management activities across your cloud environment. This central function provides and controls access to the billing and costs tools, co-owning a cross-organizationally approved tagging dictionary defining cost categories, managing commitment purchases, and being a primary business partner for the finance organization. This central function is responsible for driving awareness about how the cloud environment is being used within the organization, performing budget reviews, and helping with forecasting exercises.
This function is also responsible for defining and implementing a cost management tooling strategy, which may require the procurement and curation of partner tools for internal consumption, or identify internal resources to build in-house cost management tools. Tools should be built to automate as many cost management activities as possible to reduce undifferentiated work, and to enable scale. In addition to a centralized approach at commitment purchases, the cloud financial management function augments existing business and technical processes to instill cost-awareness (such as, introducing cost into change management, incident management, and service operationalization/readiness processes), maintain direct relationships with technical, finance and business stakeholders to raise cross-organizational cost awareness (such as, through hackathons, all hands meetings, frugality awards), ensure cost transparency as it pertains to the business being supported by cloud (such as, KPI development, cost reporting), and drive cloud spend concerns to closure (such as budget variances, spend anomalies, root cause identification, and remediation).
