FinOps: Follow The Money

How to start collecting cloud spend

In the FinOps methodology the first step is always “Inform”. In the FinOps adoption whitepaper it’s more specifically labelled as “Research” and it is always stage 1 in your FinOps Journey no matter if the FinOps journey started top-down or bottom-up.

As described in the whitepaper (which you can reference here: https://www.finops.org/wg/adopting-finops/) a complete picture needs to be built of all public cloud spend and usage. All major public cloud providers have cost and usage statistics available in their respective portals.

But how do you get visibility on all cloud spend, also the spend that you as (aspiring) FinOps Lead don’t yet know about? Here are a few tips:

Check contracts

Depending on the maturity level of contract management in your organization this may already be an investigation onto itself. First stops to check are Purchasing/Procurement and/or Legal departments. Boring as it may be: reading the contracts may already lead to discoveries like up-front spend commitments for cloud services that were added in as a means of achieving a contract-level discount or reducing software maintenance costs (Oracle Support Rewards for example). You may be sitting on a pot of already spent money that nobody is getting any business value from!

Check invoices

Get to know your Finance department. You will be working with them a lot in your FinOps journey so building a good relationship with Finance will be crucial for your success. Because you share common goals like budget consciousness and spend reduction there is a basis for cooperation.
See if you can get access to the detailed invoice statements and see if you can spot cloud spend. Getting access to the detailed invoices is important because if you receive aggregated invoices per period (month, quarter etc.) and just the totalized spend is booked into a budget you’re not going to find the spend when investigating from the budget side. Just like when investigating contracts: always try to go the source to get the highest level of detail. Later on in the journey ingesting and analyzing this data will be automated but it is a good practice to circle back to basics every once in a while to look for new “shadow” initiatives generating uncontrolled cloud spend.

Check expense claims

The easiest way to start with any cloud vendor is to just sign up with whatever credit card is on hand. Whether that is a corporate credit card or somebody’s personal credit card, in the end somebody will need to get paid back the money or the balance on the corporate credit card needs to be settled. Usually the credit card holder needs to list the vendor and the justification for their expense claim and provide the (VAT) invoice. It is in these expense claims that a lot of hidden cloud spend can be found by looking for references to cloud vendors, monthly recurring charges from the same vendors.

Reach Out

It’s detailed work like this that needs to be done to find the spend that you don’t know about. Aside from contacts in Finance, Legal and Procurement you may find that the Security team is willing to help out. Finding shadow IT initiatives that are outside of the field of view of the security team present a potential risk to the overall security posture of the company and usually they welcome initiatives that are going to help them get better visibility. Find the common benefit and use it to your advantage in your FinOps investigations.

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