Dive Brief:
- The FinOps Foundation is developing a set of technical guidelines for standardizing cloud cost, usage and billing data, the association announced Wednesday.
- Through a steering committee chaired by Udam Dewaraja, former head of global cloud financial management at Citigroup, the foundation will outline FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification, an effort dubbed FOCUS. Google and Microsoft, founding FinOps Foundation members, will also serve on the committee.
- “Today, there’s no clear way to unify cost and usage data sets across different vendors,” Dewaraja said in the announcement. "Having previously faced this challenge as a practitioner, I am convinced that a vendor-neutral, open-source specification with a common schema and terminology will drive the FinOps discipline forward in a major way.”
Dive Insight:
The new specifications aim to ease cloud migrations by reducing billing complexity and the overhead tied to vendor chargebacks and inefficient allocations.
As cloud adopters struggle to control spending on infrastructure, software and other “as a Service” features, many organizations and their CIOs have turned to FinOps, an evolving cloud cost governance framework, for guidance.
Managing cloud spend is a growing concern, according to a March survey of 750 cloud decision-makers by software company Flexera. More than 4 in 5 respondents said controlling costs was their top cloud challenge.
Hybrid multicloud ecosystems complicate the process, frustrating attempts to forecast and account for cloud expenditures.
By enabling collaboration between cloud companies, SaaS providers, and FinOps tool developers, the new standards will help standardize terminology and billing concepts.
The initial goal is to rationalize the IaaS ecosystem and then expand to SaaS, PaaS and on-prem costs to unify reporting across the enterprise, the announcement said.
The FinOps Foundation said the specification will be available for licensed use by anyone who creates billing data, those who ingest or analyze cost or usage data and by organizations who wish to standardize the billing data they receive.
