FinOps maturity assessment generates £4m annual savings

The Challenge

A leading Google Cloud enterprise customer needed to drive efficiencies and optimisation in their cloud estate after almost a decade of growth in their cloud consumption. The current governance and organisational setup presented a number of challenges; with a lack of consistent and granular cost allocation, inconsistent application of cost guardrails and the absence of a formal, unified approach to FinOps.

Qodea proposed to embed a team of FinOps specialists into their cloud management team, to help them understand, control and optimise its cloud costs.

The Solution

Qodea’s Agile Delivery and FinOps Consultancy teams, worked closely with the company’s stakeholders to conduct a FinOps Maturity Assessment. Interviews and assessments were conducted across multiple departments to gauge a holistic business view across industry standard FinOps principles.

The first phase of the process culminated in a FinOps Maturity Report, providing an ‘as-is’ status in four FinOps ‘domains’; a target state for each domain; and a detailed, prioritised (effort versus potential saving) backlog of actions to help them reach that target maturity state, including process and organisational refinements, tooling and architectural optimisation proposals and more transformational technical programs.

The Outcomes

Within a year, the customer and embedded Qodea FinOps team had realised:

Looking to the future - continuous optimisation

The maturity assessment identified 90 items the organisation could do to improve their FinOps practices. The plan ranks tasks by effort vs savings - ensuring they focus on the areas that will make the most impact for the business.

Having realised significant savings by collaboratively capturing the ‘low hanging fruit’, the customer and Qodea FinOps team are now focusing on the more transformational backlog items. This approach will ensure that all workloads and processes, new and old, are grounded in FinOps best practices, ensuring the customer gets maximum bang for their buck.