|FinOps adoption with
Softchoice and Azure
Helping our customers win back control over cloud costs.

Introduction: Enterprises can’t capture the full value of cloud
Today, too many organizations have invested in the cloud as a foundational piece of their IT strategy but aren’t yet realizing thevalue they expected. Many struggle to control costs as they scale. In fact, 80 percent of enterprise IT leaders cite “managingcloud spend” as a serious challenge (State of Cloud Report 2022 by Flexera).
Most find themselves in this position because they haven’t recognized the importance of modern cloud economics as apractice. They still see cloud as a cost center, rather than an engine that drives value creation and makes innovation possible.
As a result, they expose themselves to critical risks, including massive overspending compounded by poor visibility, missing
accountability and lagging innovation.

The challenge: Stakeholders aren’t aligned to the realities of cloud economics
Finance: Sporadic reporting and poor visibility into cost data leads to tunnel vision on cost takeout,
making it harder to course correct.
Procurement: Poor understanding of cloud SKUs and billing structures makes it difficult tointerpret and manage billing and attribution.
Engineering and application development: Unaware of the need for continuous optimization ofutilization, engineers and developers consume excess cloud resources without accountability.
Product and line of business teams: Without clear visibility into cloud usage and costs, it’s near
impossible to extract or articulate the business value of cloud.
C-suite: All these challenges make the strategic value of cloud less clear, resulting in reactive
tactics rather than proactive innovation.

The solution: FinOps makes it possible to capture the total value of Azure cloud
When enterprises bring a traditional sourcing and infrastructure consumption mindset to cloud, they often don’t realize how muchtheir operating models and culture need to change. Modern financial operations, or FinOps, introduces shared financialtransparency, governance and processes across all stakeholders. In our experience, it takes a FinOps practice to capture the total
value of cloud.
A FinOps practice brings together finance, technology and business stakeholders to establish:
Cloud operating models: A working financial operating model for Azure cloud.
Governance at scale: An effective way to introduce accountability for cloud spend.
Real transformative change: A cultural practice for collaborative financial and operational control.
To learn more, read the Softchoice white paper on FinOps and the future of cloud economics.

FinOps adoption with Softchoice
FinOps adoption led by the Softchoice Design Studio helps organizations co-create a FinOps strategy
and put it into practice through an iterative, three-step process:Inform: Communicating the business and technical drivers of cloud consumption to improve visibility
and allow users to forecast, track and monitor cloud spend in real time with the help of analytics tools.
Optimize: Gathering and interpreting cloud utilization and cost data to find and act on rate levers andopportunities to optimize costs, including automation, rightsizing and committed consumption rates.
Operate: Establishing continuous tracking and measurement to correlate cloud metrics to revenue
generating activities (unit economics), often through a cloud center of excellence (CCOE).

A typical Softchoice FinOps engagement
What happens?

What success looks like:

Research and discovery: Deep dive into current FinOps
maturity to root out and understand goals and obstacles.

• Breakup of departmental silos, clearer accountability
and an auditable environment

Workshops: Co-creation of solutions to advance maturity,
including a detailed FinOps strategy and enablement plan.
Documentation and executive summary: Packaged
deliverable capturing engagement outcomes, value
extracted and solution plan.

• Reduced waste, lower costs and less stress whencloud bills arrive• Improved cross-organizational trust and goodwill
around Azure cloud investment• Renewed growth and innovation with applications
and features released faster

Success story: Financial services
Challenge

Solution

Results

A leading financial institution
underwent rapid cloud adoption,and quickly found themselves
overspending due to dynamic,
less predictable spend in thecloud. In response, their financeteam scrambled to establish
accountability and transparency.

The company’s leadership aligned
on a FinOps strategy, enabledclear governance and used data
to establish a trusted budgeting
practice through standardized tools
and reporting.

The new cross-organizational
partnership helped this customer
accrue 20-30 percent in annual
cost avoidance. FinOps adoption
with Softchoice and Azure also
helped them plan and forecast
cloud budgets with greater trustand confidence.

Reach out to the Softchoice Design Studio to discuss opportunities for Softchoice FinOps.

www.softchoice.com