The cloud keeps you competitive in the modern economy, but as it takes over more and more of your IT network and operations, it can become expensive very quickly. Like many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), you may have noticed that you are now overspending on unused storage, oversized virtual machines, inactive workloads, and unnecessary subscriptions that slowly but surely drain your resources.
FinOps is a practice that addresses this problem by helping your business manage cloud spending strategically, without depriving your teams of the resources they need to operate efficiently.
Fortunately, artificial intelligence for SMBs is now making financial operations (FinOps) faster, smarter, and more automated, so you can get your costs under control without excess spending. Let’s take a look at how AI tools can help you identify hidden waste, optimize cloud resources, and reduce unnecessary costs.
What is FinOps?
FinOps is a financial management approach that helps businesses monitor, control, and optimize cloud spending. It combines finance, IT, and operational teams to ensure resources are used efficiently and cost-effectively.
In the pre-cloud age, you paid for IT once and had to work with the computing resources provided, regardless of whether they were more or less than you needed. Today, cloud resources can scale instantly according to your needs, but this means costs fluctuate based on usage. Without oversight, spending can quickly spiral out of control.
FinOps creates visibility into cloud usage and spending patterns. It helps you understand:
- Which departments use the most resources
- Which workloads generate unnecessary costs
- Where cloud resources are underutilized
- How to optimize performance without overspending
While it is a cost control measure, FinOps is not simply slashing costs. You still need the cloud to operate optimally to generate revenue, so FinOps endeavors to maximize business value from your cloud investments without degrading your capabilities.
How FinOps optimizes cloud spending
Many businesses pay for cloud resources they no longer use. Virtual machines may continue running after projects end, storage may grow unchecked, and employees may provision unnecessary services.
FinOps helps solve these problems through continuous monitoring and optimization, including:
- Rightsizing: Matching cloud resources to your actual business needs
- Identifying idle resources: Tracking unused databases, inactive applications, and orphaned data
- Resource scheduling: Shutting down nonessential resources during evenings or weekends to reduce expenses
- Continuous usage monitoring: Keeping visibility over who uses what, teams can be held accountable for the cloud resources they utilize
How to utilize AI to eliminate wasteful cloud spending
All this extra work for FinOps might seem excessive for an SMB like yours, but artificial intelligence is changing the game by automating many of the time-consuming tasks. Now you can optimize your cloud spend just like big enterprises, just without the high time and labor costs.
Here’s how you can implement AI in your cloud FinOps efforts:
- Assess your cloud network: Before you even get started choosing AI tools, analyze your entire cloud environment to determine which services are being used and how much you are actually spending each month.
- Set FinOps goals: Meet with stakeholders to determine your goals, whether that's slashing costs, improving provisioning, setting up automated monitoring and reports, or a combination of many objectives.
- Find the right AI tools: There are many AI tools available, but you need the ones that work towards your goals and integrate with your tech stack. Consider bringing in a technology consultant if your team lacks the industry knowledge.
- Integrate with care: When it comes to FinOps and AI in general, there is no “set and forget”. You must carefully and intentionally integrate AI tools into your processes and workflows, or you’ll end up with more problems later down the line.
- Train your teams: Your AI tools still need capable people to implement and manage them. Have your IT department or outsourced IT consultant train your employees on the usage of your chosen AI tools to ensure adoption and optimization.
- Monitor and adjust: Again, you can’t just flip the AI switch and reap the benefits forever. As the market and your needs grow and change, you must revisit your AI tools to tweak settings and processes as needed.
With the experienced consultants from XBASE managing your AI FinOps, you can optimize cloud spending and maximize cost savings now and into the future. Contact XBASE today and put AI to work to save your business money.