INSIGHTS

1. FinOps is essential for organizations that are looking to transform digitally and achieve agility, drive innovation, and improve adherence to compliances among other business goals.
2. FinOps is crucial for healthcare organizations as it not just measures the cloud spend but promotes developing a proper framework to identify opportunities for optimizations.
3. FinOps also enhances an organization’s overall agility to respond to the changing market demands while building secure software solutions.

The recent past has seen an evolution in healthcare organizations as they have started prioritizing digital transformation and modernization leading to higher cloud adoption. These organizations now leverage cloud technologies to:

• Scale and collaborate seamlessly
• Gain the flexibility of providing different services via various channels
• Reduce operational costs
• Exchange information securely

With this, healthcare organizations can now ensure security and compliance, access innovative technologies, and provide reliable disaster recovery and business continuity solutions.

This brings us to the prediction that the global healthcare cloud computing market will grow at a CAGR of 17.8% from 2022 to 2027 and will reach $89.4 billion by 2027 (as mentioned in a report). While this will prove highly beneficial, it will also come with new challenges, particularly in managing cloud costs. In a recent survey by Flexera, majority of the respondents said that cloud cost management remains one of the top initiatives in their organization. The survey also highlighted that organizations waste an average of 30% of their cloud spend due to a lack of visibility into their usage and spending.

As cloud usage continues to grow, this challenge will only become more significant! 

It is to address this challenge that healthcare organizations are turning to FinOps (Financial Operations), or cloud financial management. However, FinOps is more beneficial than just cost optimization. It provides more than just a framework for managing cloud costs and optimizing cloud spending while aligning cloud spending with broader business objectives. Let’s explore some of the benefits in this article.

WHAT THEN, IS FINOPS?

FinOps – Financial Operations, as the name suggests, is a technology that enables businesses to run their financial operations efficiently.

Now let’s look into this with the backdrop of a healthcare organization. In healthcare, FinOps is a cultural shift where each team takes on the financial accountability and ownership of the variable spends of cloud resources as per standard defined best practices to be able to make trade-offs among quality and cost in their cloud architecture and investment decisions.

HOW CAN ORGANIZATIONS GET STARTED ON THEIR FINOPS JOURNEY?

HOW CAN FINOPS HELP IN GOING BEYOND COST OPTIMIZATION?

While cost optimization is an important part of FinOps, it's not the only focus of a successful FinOps program. Here are some ways that organizations can go beyond cost optimization and use FinOps to drive broader business goals: 

1. Align IT and business objectives: By involving finance in cloud spending decisions, organizations can ensure cloud spending alignment with broader business objectives. This can help ensure directing cloud spending towards initiatives aligned with the organization's overall goals and priorities. 
2. Improve resource allocation: In addition to optimizing costs, FinOps can help organizations allocate resources more effectively. By tracking usage patterns and identifying areas where resources are being underutilized, FinOps can help ensure directing resources towards initiatives that deliver the most value to the organization. 
3. Drive innovation: FinOps can help organizations drive innovation by enabling teams to experiment with new cloud services and technologies in a cost-effective way. By providing teams with visibility into cloud spending and usage patterns, FinOps can help ensure alignment of innovation initiatives with the organization's overall goals and priorities. 
4. Increase agility: FinOps can help organizations increase agility by enabling teams to provision and deprovision cloud resources quickly and efficiently. By providing teams with visibility into cloud usage and costs, FinOps can help ensure that teams have the resources they need when they need them, without incurring unnecessary costs. 
5. Enhance security and compliance: By involving finance in cloud spending decisions, organizations can ensure alignment of cloud spending with security and compliance requirements. FinOps can help ensure provisioning resources securely, and alignment of cloud usage with regulatory requirements and organizational policies. 

CONCLUSION

FinOps is a crucial part of the healthcare IT companies’ digital transformation. It is not just limited to measuring the cloud spend but promotes developing a proper framework to identify opportunities for optimizations. It drives innovation by allowing teams to experiment safely while also making them accountable. FinOps also enhances an organization’s overall agility to respond to the changing market demands while building secure software solutions.

SUMMARY

FinOps is more beneficial than just cost optimization. It provides more than a framework for managing cloud costs and optimizing cloud spending while aligning cloud spending with broader business objectives. The benefits range from aligning your IT and business objectives to enhancing agility and security. Here, we provide you with a snapshot of some of the benefits gained through FinOps.