FinOps Foundation’s “FinOps Certified Professional” Certification
Tags: aws, finops, cloudfinancialmanagement, finopsfoundation
Published: 2022-04-15 10:50:03

We write to share our experience and reflections upon being the first students, and graduates ([Jiri](https://verify.skilljar.com/c/9mwi9h25i3mk) & [Ermanno](https://verify.skilljar.com/c/bfowtp8me9bx)) of the FinOps Foundation’s FinOps Certified Professional certification program.


## Significance of the Cloud Costs Problem
While only [5-15% of IT workloads have been moved from companies’ own in-house data centers to the public clouds](https://www.ft.com/content/aaced9d6-5f2a-466d-aec1-b85c7572c1a3) so far, [the cloud adoption grew at 25% in the last year](https://venturebeat.com/2022/01/24/report-cloud-adoption-grew-25-in-the-past-year/), out of which [40% came from North America](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cloud-computing-market-40-growth-160000953.html). The cloud costs are enormous and up to [32% enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure is wasted (Flexera 2022)](https://www.flexera.com/blog/cloud/cloud-computing-trends-2022-state-of-the-cloud-report/) – [Why your cloud computing costs are so high – and what you can do about them – SiliconANGLE](https://siliconangle.com/2021/11/28/cloud-computing-costs-high-can/) explains that 
* A recent survey of 350 IT and cloud decision-makers by cloud observability platform maker Virtana Inc. found that 82% said they had incurred unnecessary cloud costs, 56% lack tools to manage their spending programmatically and 86% can’t easily get a global view of all their costs when they need it. Gartner Inc. predicts that 60% of infrastructure and operations leaders will encounter public cloud cost overruns. And Flexera Software LLC’s 2020 State of the Cloud Report estimated that 30% of enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure is wasted.
* As a result, “40% of cloud-based instances are at least one size too big,” estimates DoiT’s Purcell. “You’d be surprised how often workloads run at 5% to 10% utilization.
* Studies show that up to 46% of data is just trash,” said Gary Lyng, chief marketing officer at Aparavi Software Corp., a distributed data management software provider.“Get rid of that first before you back it up or move it to the cloud.”
* However, DoiT’s Purcell estimates that fewer than 25% of customers take advantage of cost-savings plans such as reserved instances and spot instances. “It’s like going to the grocery store; I have a pocket full of coupons, but I have to make sure they’re the right ones,” he said.

##FinOps Foundation

>     FinOps is an evolving cloud financial management discipline and cultural practice that enables organizations to get maximum business value by helping engineering, finance, technology and business teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions.
>     –FinOps Foundation

FinOps Foundation has been established with the goals of
* Collecting the body of FinOps knowledge across public clouds – this is their principal contribution – without FinOps Foundation, there is no single place covering independently the entire problem space of rapidly evolving cloud financial management – each cloud provider may discuss their cost optimization tools but certainly lacks the global picture of the industry best practices.
* Promoting FinOps Best Practices and collaboration among its members – FinOps Foundation addresses these via periodic Zoom calls or conferences, and via their certification.

Please read more at [Jiri's website](https://jiripik.com/2022/03/23/finops-foundations-finops-certified-professional-certification/).