FinOps and Cloud Cost: Why IT and Finance Must Collaborate Now

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As businesses embraced remote work and flexible technology solutions during and immediately after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, many purchased cloud infrastructure and other services without much thought for the future.

Now, though, that future has arrived, and organizations need to shave excess off their budgets without weakening their technology infrastructure or creating inefficient workflows. Enter FinOps, a new approach that aims to foster collaboration between the often disparate finance, IT, and operations teams.

FinOps necessity a sign of the maturity of the market, according to tech evangelist

Aviram Levy, tech evangelist at Zesty, a platform vendor that automates FinOps research and analysis, has spent the last several years of his career facilitating complex conversations around cloud spend and how organizations can optimize without sacrifice.

“This isn’t just a buzzword, this is a real need for businesses everywhere,” Levy said. “I’ve never really met someone who doesn’t want to save money.”

So why doesn’t every organization have an optimized stack? Levy said the issues lie in creating a shared understanding.

“The one thing everyone has in common is that no one on these teams share the same language,” Levy said, referring to the fact that IT, finance and operations professionals have different subject expertise and often do not understand each other’s work. “But really, technology should be one shared effort. FinOps creates a shared language.”

Before joining the Zesty team to address AWS environment spend, Levy worked at AWS as a technical account manager where he addressed businesses’ needs and budgetary constraints. Now, he works with Zesty to bring those conversations to fruition faster through automated, tailored insights.

Zesty embraces automation roots and layers in actionable insights and recommendations

The Zesty platform offers users “AI-driven offerings for compute, database, storage, and containers,” according to its website, and its Cloud Services for MSPs offering takes its enterprise platform and gives solution providers the ability to view all of their clients through one experience.

“Zesty was born as an automation platform, and that will always be true,” Levy said. But now, the team has also developed visibility and recommendation capabilities within the platform to provide “one singular place that shows opportunity” across consumption and spend within several AWS products.

“We aren’t targeting finance teams, we are focused on opportunities specific to developers and the technical deployment,” Levy said. “But this insight, and the visibility we show with the recommendations that come from that, that helps all teams achieve their KPIs and goals.”

Looking forward, Levy sees AI and LLM spending as the eventual next opportunity for optimization, though the cloud remains his top priority as he and the Zesty team continue to innovate within their platform.

To learn more about Zesty and the platform offering for MSPs, contact the team or dig into their partner resources.

FinOps platforms are growing in popularity and demand, especially within the channel. Channel Insider has previously covered cloud cost optimization and EPM tools.