The three pillars of FinOps

In this section, we will explain our view of the three fundamental pillars upon which a successful FinOps practice should be built.

Let’s describe one by one the three pillars, which are Inform, Optimize, and Operate, and the key points to work on and develop in each one, alongside some examples to illustrate how to get started.

Inform

One of the most important things every FinOps practice must do is to improve the visibility of cloud costs for all the technical, financial, and project management teams. Everyone needs to be initially aware of how costs are distributed between, for example, business units, projects, offices or locations, and cloud regions. This process is often called cost allocation, as it allows you to divide costs across different units.

In many organizations, this is key to enabling two important cloud cost visibility exercises, which are showback and chargeback:

• Showback refers to the operation of dividing...