For federal agencies, performance of Cloud FinOps is becoming an essential practice to save money, drive more value, mature financial management and ultimately, drive the mission forward. Cloud FinOps can provide improved cost visibility and resource utilization to better enhance efficiency, security, agility and speed to market.

Yet, despite its benefits, challenges exist when it comes to fully implementing Cloud FinOps at scale within federal agencies. These include challenges related to legacy systems and processes, agency culture and roles, security and compliance concerns, complex procurement processes, and limited resources or expertise in the field.

At GDIT, we advise agencies on how to establish a Cloud FinOps strategy and implement it with the right tools, architecture and processes. Our own Cloud FinOps mission solution is purpose-built for agency environments and unique mission needs.

Below are top 5 federal best practices to adopt Cloud FinOps, learned from experience across our over 100+ cloud projects and programs.

Assess Maturity Level and Develop a Strategy

Assess how you procure, deploy, and manage cloud resources today and what gaps need to be filled. Answer questions such as: Do I know what cloud services my applications and budgets are supporting, and are those services deployed in the most cost-effective manner? What is my current cloud spend compared to my budget?

Next, develop a strategy that fits your agency’s priorities, environment, and mission. Be transparent about what the strategy is and isn’t, and set clear metrics and goals based on your maturity assessment. Communicate about all of it, and regularly update stakeholders on your progress, roadblocks, and learnings.

Establish a Centralized Cloud FinOps Team and Collaborate with Key Stakeholders

Create a core team of individuals within your organization, with clear roles and a charter, who are familiar with the principles of cloud FinOps. Task this group with identifying needed resources, potential projects and enterprise-wide protocols related to your cloud FinOps implementation. This will create clear roles and responsibilities and ensure a breadth of perspectives and best practices are infused into your strategy. Identify the stakeholders who need to be aware of, contribute to, or approve of your plan and bring them into the process as you develop and deploy your strategy.

Leverage Cloud FinOps Tools and Technologies to Optimize

As with anything, there are myriad tools and capabilities available to help support you on your cloud FinOps journey. Select the most appropriate tools that meet your strategic priorities and maximize value. If you are struggling to categorize, segregate, and report on cloud usage in ways that align to your business or contract line-item requirements, choose tools such as Apptio, Cloudability, or CloudCheckr, that are strong in that area. If governance and guardrails are the most important cloud management requirements along with optimization, then look at tools such as Kion that can do both.

Examine the opportunities for cost optimization that make sense within your organization, as well as how your organization is uniquely positioned to operationalize them. Part of this exercise should also include a reporting mechanism to key stakeholders, further reinforcing the value of cloud FinOps among key decision makers. Moreover, provide tactical suggestions and cost-benefit analyses resulting from taking action, such as projecting a percentage of savings simply by upgrading legacy cloud services to current ones.

Cloud FinOps strategies can also be greatly enhanced and accelerated with the help of strategically deployed automation and tooling. This ensures human focus can be directed to higher-value tasks and removes the risk of error from numerous standard and repeatable processes or transactions.

Establish Governance and Accountability

A core task of a cloud FinOps team should be to establish governance and accountability protocols. These should be clearly stated and communicated and evaluated often to ensure their relevance and continued applicability to your evolving cloud FinOps implementation. This level of transparency and tracking will ensure that you’re getting the most out of your investments – time, financial, and otherwise – in cloud FinOps.

To maximize your cloud resources, choose a partner with the expertise and tools to guide you through the process and help you establish a cloud FinOps strategy that fits your agency’s priorities, environment, and mission. Without question, cloud FinOps has the potential to produce enormous benefits for agencies – benefits that recur year after year and can even compound with time. Recently, GDIT helped a Department of War agency identify more than 25% annually in potential savings by implementing cloud FinOps, mostly attributed to underused resources. And we know that across the federal government, opportunities exist to derive similarly large and recurring savings and to invest those savings into other mission-critical priorities.