The cloud offers unparalleled scalability, agility, and innovation potential. However, without a well-defined strategy, cloud costs can spiral out of control, hindering your organization’s ability to fully leverage its benefits. That’s where FinOps on Azure comes in. To help our customers learn to operationalize FinOps on Azure, we’ve recently launched two comprehensive learning curricula on our Microsoft Learn platform. We debuted these modules and more at this year’s FinOps X conference in San Diego and look forward to sharing more at FinOps X Europe in Barcelona. 

What is FinOps on Azure and why does it matter?

FinOps is a cultural practice and operational framework that brings together technology, finance, and business teams to drive financial accountability and maximize the value of your cloud investments. It’s a practice that balances many factors and is not just about cost-cutting; it’s about making informed decisions that align with your business goals, optimizing resource utilization, and ensuring the resilience of your cloud infrastructure.

By fostering collaboration between siloed teams, FinOps bridges knowledge gaps to enable intelligent tradeoffs between cloud costs, speed, and quality. It instills financial transparency and accountability into the tech value stream for cloud assets in many ways:

Cost optimization: FinOps helps you identify areas of waste, right-size resources, and implement cost-saving measures to ensure you’re only paying for what you need.
Increased visibility: Gain a clear understanding of your cloud spending patterns, allowing you to make data-driven decisions and allocate resources more effectively.
Improved agility: FinOps empowers your teams to respond quickly to changing business needs by providing the tools and processes to rapidly scale resources up or down.
Enhanced accountability: By establishing shared responsibility for cloud costs, FinOps fosters a culture of accountability and collaboration across your organization.
Risk mitigation: FinOps empowers you to proactively mitigate risks that could disrupt your cloud infrastructure operations, preventing costly downtime and associated revenue losses.

What FinOps learning resources does Microsoft offer?

To help customers operationalize FinOps, Microsoft has created comprehensive learning curricula on its Microsoft Learn platform.

Get started with FinOps: This brief yet comprehensive introduction starts by defining the FinOps operating model and its key tenets, which include principles, domains, capabilities, phases, and maturity model.

It then delves into the responsibilities of various FinOps personas and roles, such as those in Leadership, Finance, Product, Engineering, Procurements, and others. The module emphasizes the importance of collaboration and shared accountability among these groups.

Next, the module explores the FinOps lifecycle, which consists of three phases: Inform, Optimize, and Operate. The Inform phase involves understanding cloud costs and usage, the Optimize phase focuses on identifying and implementing cost optimization opportunities, and the Operate phase ensures ongoing governance and accountability.

The module also highlights the importance of enablers of FinOps culture, such as executive buy-in, incentive models, and communication strategies.

In about the span of a lunch break, the “Get started with FinOps” module can equip you with a solid foundation in the FinOps framework and prepare you for additional learning.

Adopt FinOps on Azure: This intermediate-level learning path dives deeper into operationalizing FinOps best practices on Azure. It starts by exploring cloud cost allocation and chargeback models, which are crucial for establishing accountability and incentives across different teams and business units, and covers various allocation methodologies.

Next, it delves into defining an Azure organizational structure using management groups and subscriptions. Learners gain insights into best practices for logically organizing Azure resources to align with business needs, while enabling effective cost tracking and governance.

The module then focuses on Azure native policy and resource tagging enforcement strategies. It explains how to use Azure Policy and resource tagging to enforce governance standards and enable accurate cost allocation and reporting.

Implementing Azure Advisor, budgets, and other monitoring tools is also covered. Learners learn how to configure these tools to proactively identify optimization opportunities, set spending limits, and receive alerts when usage deviates from baselines.

Configuring Microsoft Cost Management for spend visibility is another key topic. The module demonstrates how to leverage Microsoft Cost Management capabilities to gain comprehensive insights into cloud consumption and costs across the organization.

Throughout the module, real-world examples illustrate applying these FinOps practices to centralize governance and accountability across distributed Azure environments.

Overall, the Adopt FinOps on Azure module equips learners with practical skills and knowledge to implement FinOps best practices on Azure. It covers critical areas such as cost allocation, organizational structure, governance policies, monitoring, cost visibility, and resource optimization – all essential for maximizing the return on Azure investments.

An exciting time for Azure at this year’s FinOps X conference

FinOps X is the premier global conference organized by the FinOps Foundation for professionals to dive deep into the world of cloud financial management with expert-led sessions, workshops, and networking opportunities. At this year’s events, attendees connect with industry leaders, shared best practices, and learned the latest strategies to optimize cloud costs and drive business value.

If you plan to attend a future FinOps X event, we hope you have the chance to stop by our booth and learn how Microsoft FinOps on Azure can help your team implement a seamless cloud adoption and harness AI to enhance your FinOps best practices.

Leverage FinOps best practices for lasting business value

FinOps is not just a buzzword; it’s a strategic approach for organizations to maximize the cloud business value by improving efficiency and business driven decisions. By embracing FinOps principles and leveraging the resources available on Microsoft Learn, you can unlock the full potential of your cloud investment, drive innovation, and achieve lasting business value.

Begin your journey with our Get started with FinOps learning modules, then go deeper with Adopt FinOps on Azure for practical skills and knowledge to help your team implement FinOps best practices on Azure.

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