FinOps Foundation joins The Linux Foundation to nail down best cloud financial practices
At the virtual Open Source Summit, The Linux Foundation announced it was joining forces with the FinOps Foundation. Their mutual goal is to advance the discipline of FinOps through best practices, education, and standards.
FinOps combines systems, best practices, and culture to help organizations understand cloud costs and IT benefits. In the same way that DevOps revolutionized development by breaking down the barriers between developers and operators and increasing agility, FinOps increases the cloud's business value by bringing together technology, business, and finance professionals with a new set of processes.
There's a real need for FinOps. Gartner forecasts cloud spending will exceed $360 billion by 2022. But too many businesses have little insight into how they're spending their cloud dollars. The result is uncontrolled costs that aren't properly forecast or documented. Combine this with a lack of standardized tooling, and companies can suffer major losses or critical accounting practice errors. True, one of the cloud's great advantages is you can procure and set up IT infrastructure in seconds or minutes instead of taking days or weeks -- but, at the same time, it's made a mess of tracking business IT spending.
"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," said Mike Dolan, Linux Foundation Projects' vice president and general manager. "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."
"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," said J.R. Storment, the FinOps Foundation executive director, in a statement. "With the Linux Foundation's support, especially across its world-class training organization, we can serve this growing community."
To help spread FinOps' basic concepts, the FinOps community is defining cloud financial management standards and offering classes and certification. As part of this, The Linux Foundation is announcing a new, free edX course, Introduction to FinOps. This introductory course will cover the basics of FinOps and how it can help your company by building a culture of accountability around cloud use that helps companies make good, timely, data-backed decisions in the cloud. The course is open for enrollment now, and the content will be available to begin on the edX platform on July 21.
The FinOps Foundation is also now offering the FinOps Certified Practitioner Exam (FOCP) through the Linux Foundation. More training and certification programs are expected later this year, including the FinOps Certified Platform (FCP), FinOps Certified Service Providers (FCSP), and FinOps Training Providers (FTP).
Follow @LF_Training on Twitter or the Linux Foundation training page for more information and updates.