“The dirty little secret of cloud spending is that the bill never goes down.” That quote from J.R. Storment of the FinOps Foundation is a key theme in the rise of FinOps – short for financial operations. It’s a relatively new professional specialty that is seeing strong growth as IT users wrestle with the economics of cloud, colocation and on-premises infrastructure.
In his recent appearance on the DCF Show podcast to discuss his research for AFCOM, Bill Kleyman noted that 58 percent of the respondents in this year’s survey said they ware looking to shift workloads from cloud platforms to either colocation or on-premises facilities. This data comes amid a larger debate about repatriation, prompted by an essay from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz projecting that cloud users could save hundreds of millions of dollars by shifting workloads off of cloud platforms. That assertion has been hotly debated by advocates of cloud services.
Kleyman says one thing is certain: Many users are feeling “sticker shock” as their use of cloud expands over time. “The first step is just asking the questions,” Bill says on the DCF Show. Here’s a video outtake of our discussion about FinOps and cloud cost crunching, as we discuss the history of FinOps and how to apply these principles.
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Data Center Frontier is edited by Rich Miller, the data center industry’s most experienced journalist. For more than 20 years, Rich has profiled the key role played by data centers in the Internet revolution.