- The Linux Foundation is announcing a new, free edX course, Introduction to FinOps
- As per Gartner, cloud spending is forecast to exceed $360 billion by 2022
The Linux Foundation has announced the intent to host the FinOps Foundation to advance the discipline of FinOps through best practices, education, and standards. The FinOps Foundation includes 1,500 individual members globally and represents more than 500 companies with more than $1 billion in revenue each. It said that FinOps increases the business value of the cloud by bringing together technology, business, and finance professionals with a new cultural set, knowledge skills, and technical processes. It added that companies represented among membership include Atlassian, Autodesk, Bill.com, HERE Technologies, LiveRamp, Just Eat, Nationwide, Neustar, Nike, and Spotify, among others.
Mike Dolan, vice president, and general manager, Linux Foundation Projects said, “Where there is technology disruption, there is opportunity for business transformation. FinOps is exactly this and represents a shift in operations strategy, process, and culture. This type of disruption and transformation is also where community and industry-wide collaboration play critical roles in enabling a whole new market opportunity. We’re pleased to be the place where that work can happen.”
Timely, data-backed decisions in the cloud
It said that the FinOps community is defining cloud financial management standards and is increasing access to education and certification for this discipline across industries. To help in this effort, the Linux Foundation is announcing a new, free edX course, Introduction to FinOps. It will help to advance education and knowledge in this emerging area and to cultivate a growing community of professionals.
The Linux Foundation said that this introductory course will cover the basics of FinOps and how it can positively impact an organisation by building a culture of accountability around cloud use. This will help companies make good, timely, data-backed decisions in the cloud as per the Linux Foundation. The FinOps Foundation is offering the FinOps Certified Practitioner Exam (FOCP) through the Linux Foundation.
Maximise efficiency of purchases
J.R. Storment, executive director of the FinOps Foundation said, “Technology and business leaders are seeking support for understanding how to manage cloud technologies and spending across their enterprises and the FinOps Foundation brings to bear the resources required to enable them to innovate inside their companies. With the Linux Foundation’s support, especially across its world-class training organization, we can serve this growing community.”
FinOps helps companies to ensure that they get the most value from every dollar spent in the cloud. It pushes accountability for spending to the edge where developers control purchasing decisions. It also provides a new set of centralised processes to maximise efficiency of purchases and the ability to allocate spending to teams.
Cloud spending is forecast to exceed $360 billion by 2022
As per Gartner, cloud spending is forecast to exceed $360 billion by 2022. It said that finance teams have very little insight into where that spend is being allocated within their organisations. This leads to uncontrolled costs that are not properly forecast or documented along with lack of standardised tooling. This can lead to major losses or errors in critical accounting practices. Procurement of IT infrastructure has moved from taking days or weeks to seconds or minutes. It has accelerated application development but dramatically decreased efficiencies in financial operations.
Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) said, “As the cloud native movement deepens inside organizations large and small, understanding how to optimize the infrastructure footprint through cultural change and engineering practices is critical. CNCF welcomes the FinOps Foundation to the Linux Foundation and we look forward to collaborating across communities to improve cloud financial management for all.”