FOCUS for your FinOps teams is here!  

As companies grow their Azure footprints, it becomes increasingly important to grow the maturity of managing Azure Spend. The modern approach of combining Finance and DevOps is called Financial Operations, or FinOps. Azure FinOps is like a team sport for managing cloud costs. It brings together engineers, finance staff, IT, and business teams to make sure everyone is on the same page about cloud expenses. A few of the concepts FinOps teams emphasize are as follows: 

• Reducing cloud costs by finding cost savings opportunities, ways to do cost avoidance and identifying waste and overprovisioned resources. Another part of this could be leveraging commitment-based discounts (long term reservations or consumption minimums).  

• Spreading FinOps process adoption organize-wide by working through cultural changes and process improvements. 

• Managing data and reporting involves gathering, analyzing, and presenting cloud cost data effectively. Accessible, timely reports are crucial for informed decision-making and communication with business leaders. 

• Allocating costs to the proper business units related to specific IT projects with the use of Tagging, supporting chargeback models gives business leaders more accurate information to make technology investment decisions. 

Historically, trying to get a handle on analyzing cloud services and their run rates from the various cloud vendors may have required convoluted and non-standard data exports. Starting in June of this year, the FinOps Foundation has released FOCUS. “FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification” 1.0. This is a big deal and will help create a singular standard for Azure billing as well as aid FinOps teams in implementing adoption. This revolutionary effort will form a standard format for billing data, helping organizations analyze and report on cost and usage patterns across all their cloud services. FOCUS is designed to help solve problems such as: 

• As enterprise organizations seek higher uptime and less vendor lock in, multi-cloud deployments will become more and more common. With this, likely comes a dramatic increase in the difference of SKUs and billing processes between vendors. Each provider may have billing data in different proprietary formats. FOCUS will help simplify this data collection and comparison by offering a standard. 

• Being able to trust the data and how it’s being reported to decision makers due to different terminologies with billing information. FOCUS aims to solve that core data issue with its standard 43 defined data columns.  

To add to this, it is now possible to export your data using this standard right from Azure Cost Analysis using the FOCUS format (feature currently in Preview). 

To set up one time or scheduled Exports, navigate either to the Tenant, Management Group or Subscription you wish to view cost data on and click Cost analysis 

On the top ribbon on the Cost analysis page, select Configure subscription

On the Configuration page, select Exports

Next, click Schedule export or Create

On the Export page, select Cost and usage (FOCUS) on the bottom

Finally, setup your Export settings (uses a Storage Account’s Blob Store) and set your Destination to retrieve your data. You can map a PowerBI Dashboard to this blob store to build advanced reports, with up-to-the-day or monthly data.

As organizations expand their Azure usage, it is essential to develop mature cloud cost management as a core competency. Azure FinOps, by bridging the gap between finance and DevOps, promotes a collaborative approach to managing cloud expenses. The release of FOCUS by the FinOps Foundation represents a significant advancement, offering a standardized format for billing data that simplifies cost management. How can FOCUS benefit your organization, and what are some of the most critical pain points it can help address?

Sources:

Microsoft Cost Management updates

FOCUS 1.0 is Now Available. Practitioners and Clouds Continue Adoption.