In traditional on-premises environments, key users have managed control over their resources, change happens slowly, and costs are fixed. However, in a cloud environment, that isn’t the case. The cloud is an extremely powerful and flexible tool, where changes can be made very quickly, and decentralized management can lead to wasted spend, resource inefficiencies, and poor security practices.
To help tackle these challenges, many organizations have created a formal Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) to govern the usage of the cloud across their organization. This working group can be a formalized group of key stakeholders from different functional areas of your organization, or a more informal group of employees working towards a common goal of driving cloud best practices. Keep in mind that every CCoE looks different, and is influenced by an organization’s size, scale, and cloud maturity.
The CCoE has three main focus areas: Cloud Financial Management, Cloud Operations, and Cloud Security and Compliance. Because of how easy it is to overspend in the cloud—and now more than ever organizations are looking to be financially lean—we’re going to focus on Cloud Financial Management.
Learn more about building a successful cloud operations and cloud security function in our Whitepaper.
Cloud Financial Management (CFM) is a function within the CCoE that helps align and develop financial goals, drive a cost-conscious culture through best practices, establish guardrails to meet financial targets, and gain greater business efficiencies.
It might be hard to know where to start when creating your CFM, so we’ve gathered the best practices here!
1. Executing the cloud strategy
All of the stakeholders within the CCoE are responsible for defining a cloud strategy—if there isn’t one already in place—that supports the needs of the entire organization, both now and in the future.
The cloud strategy should answer questions like how quickly the organization will migrate, which cloud providers best meet the business’s overall objectives, and how application and infrastructure architectures will evolve. It will be up to the CCoE to refine these strategies and concepts over time to make sure they adapt to overarching changes in business strategy.
2. Driving collaboration and best practices across key stakeholders
Cloud Financial Management isn’t the only area of excellence within a CCoE (Operations and Security being two other main areas of excellence). There needs to be alignment across all areas to ensure the cloud strategy is built with everyone in mind, from application development to enterprise architecture and security. This working group should collect and develop the best practices, workflows, and alerts for their respective functions.
3. Evaluating and utilizing technology to support business initiatives
One of the key components of executing on a cloud strategy is determining how your organization will access, secure, manage, integrate, and govern across your public cloud and hybrid environments. To execute this, your CCoE must implement a set of cloud management solutions that can provide visibility, help optimize your resources, and establish governance policies to manage usage and security.
Using a platform like CloudHealth, where you can view your entire multicloud environment through a single pane of glass, give your employees the tools they need to support both their cloud and business initiatives.
If you want to learn more about the best practices of establishing a CFM practice read our Whitepaper here.
