FinOps is a whole new way of financial operations management for businesses as they move to the cloud or digitalized operations. There has been a massive adoption of cloud services over the past decade. Given the complexity of cloud, it's only natural that a new crop of tools would need to be built to address the specific needs of financial operations for cloud-based businesses, making cloud financial management a demand among businesses.

Technological research and consulting company Gartner estimated in 2022 that firms would squander as much as 30% of their budgets because of mismanaged cloud finances.

In this article, we talk about the importance of FinOps and list the top 5 solutions on the market for you to consider.

What Is FinOps?

FinOps, short for financial operations, is a management practice that promotes shared responsibility for cloud costs. Until recently, it was standard for the technical teams building applications in the cloud to have no concern for the bills they were racking up. That was another team's responsibility, like finance, to manage and track. But as we've seen from the broader shift-left movement, it is critical that the same people responsible for building and operating the cloud also have skin in the game when it comes to keeping costs in check.

The FinOps Foundation, a non-profit trade group, defines FinOps "as 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."

At the end of the day, businesses that adopt FinOps best practices will have a clear financial advantage over those who ignore those practices. From connecting technical spend to actual business value, to holding specific teams accountable for their spend-to-profit ratios, it's ultimately all about saving money and running more efficient, profitable businesses in the cloud.

Best FinOps Solution Providers

1. Finout

Finout has quickly become a preferred financial operations management solution. The company opened for business in 2022.

Finout has received US$18.5 million in funding from industry-leading investors like Team8 Capital and Pitango VC. The company's end-to-end FinOps platform is used to wrangle cloud costs within companies likeAlphaSense, ZoomInfo, Riskified, Orca Security, WIZ, and many others.

Finout is a preferred platform because it offers a single pane of glass for all of your FinOps needs, including:

a. MegaBill

The Finout platform consolidates all of your cloud expenses across the major cloud providers and 3rd party SaaS services into one, centralized dashboard. Whether your company runs on AWS or Azure, whether it uses Datadog or Snowflake, the Finout platform offers native integrations to quickly consolidate and then visualize your spending data and then analyze it with their unique virtual tagging.

b. Cost Governance

Finout's agentless cost governance suiteautomatically identifies cloud spend waste. It also allows finance and engineering teams alike to predict expenses, get alerted on anomalies, and remain on budget while they scale.

c. Cost Optimization

Finout recently launched its new AI-powered Cost Optimization feature for Amazon Web Services (AWS). This solution will automatically save businesses up to 60% on their AWS bill.

Finout is the only solution on this list that does not charge users for their cost optimization service. This means that any money saved on AWS, generated by Finout's solution, is money that stays with the customer.

Moreover, the new Cost Optimizer's support for other leading cloud and third-party companies like RDS, OpenSearch, ElastiCache, and Redshift will soon be released, per the company's latest announcement.

2. Vantage

Vantage is a leading software development company based in New York City. It opened for business in 2020.

Vantage's founders are former Digital Ocean, AWS, and GitHub employees. Top venture capital company Andreessen Horowitz is its backer. Among today's top-rated FinOps service providers, Vantage received commendations from clients citing the following benefits that the company provides:

a. Offers a complete platform

Vantage's customers benefit from this platform's complete offerings, from visibility and optimization to enterprise-level expense governance for the cloud. Their Cost Recommendations feature lets companies save money by optimizing their cloud expenses via automated cost recommendations, and their Savings Planner enables firms to make improved business decisions with tools for forecasting and modeling future savings.

b. Has integrations with leading technology firms

Vantage makes data integrations simple between this service provider and firms such as OpenAI, Azure, AWS, and Fastly.

Indeed, many organizations worldwide already depend on Vantage to optimize and administer more than US$1 billion of annualized infrastructure expenditures. These companies range from startups to Fortune 500 businesses and benefit from the Vantage platform's management, finance, and engineering tools.

3. KubeCost

KubeCost is a premier financial operations management provider in San Francisco, California. Its founders are Webb Brown and Ajay Tripathy, who opened the company in 2019.

KubeCost is the leading provider of real-time expenditure insights and visibility for teams using Kubernetes. Companies use Kubernetes to schedule and automate containerized applications' scaling, deployment, and management.

Clients who chose KubeCost praise its FinOp solution due to the following advantages:

a. Facilitates company savings

The KubeCost financial operations management services help companies discover ways to save more money. This top-rated solution facilitates clients to analyze their Kubernetes spend fast.

Furthermore, the KubeCost platform has billing integrations with AWS, Private Cloud, Azure, Data Center, and GCP. Clients get a comprehensive view of all out-of-cluster and in-cluster cloud expenses. They also benefit from outstanding features such as KubeCost's accurate monitoring, alerting, showbacks, and chargebacks.

b. User-friendly and intuitive design

KubeCost is available as Apache version 2 or open-source software. Users can install it with a helm command on any Kubernetes group in less than five minutes. Moreover, KubeCost comes with straightforward configuration and installation procedures. Users can get improvement recommendations with the software's built-in cluster wellness score.

4. Zesty

Zesty is a financial operations management solutions provider which started its operations in 2019. Its founders are Alexey Baikov and Maxim Melamedov. Their investors include Next47, S Capital VC, Samsung NEXT, B Capital Group, and Sapphire.

Zesty is committed to helping companies dramatically reduce cloud expenditures while maintaining sound software application performance. Among the benefits that Zesty financial operations management delivers are:

a. Hands-free, secure platform

The Zesty solution implements automated actions in real-time. This beneficial feature does not require the clients' software engineers to take any action. Thus, manual workloads related to managing, monitoring, and periodically adjusting cloud resources get decreased.

With the Zesty platform, customers can also avoid risks. After all, they get to hand over the cloud resources provisioning to the service provider. These benefits facilitate cloud cost savings for businesses and improve their financial operations.

b. Caring for the clients' budgets

Zesty's FinOps solution concentrates on helping businesses cut the cost of developing and running their applications. This platform uses automated actions in scaling a client's cloud resources. Clients can pay only for what they need. As a result, Zesty facilitates improving profit margins for cloud businesses significantly.

5. ProsperOps

ProsperOps is a company based in Austin, Texas. This autonomous cloud platform that helps optimize AWS savings for clients opened for business in 2018.

ProsperOps is a member of the FinOps Foundation, and its pioneers are Erik Carlin, Chris Kuehl, and Chris Cochran. They advocate that cloud cost optimization is best handled by real-time execution engines, artificial intelligence or AI, and optimization algorithms.

Clients who recommend ProsperOps financial management operations solution praise it for the following perks:

a. Time and cost-efficient

The ProsperOps platform lets clients answer a few high-level queries regarding cloud usage, similar to robo-advisors in the financial investment sector. Then, the technology handles the customers' daily and ongoing cost optimization activities.

Its algorithms enable clients to maximize their discounts 24/7. These features align discount instruments to calculate usage as it plummets or surges without manual intervention.

b. Risk-free, seamless solution

The ProsperOps platform is easy to set up with zero modifications and hazards to the client's infrastructure or data. It automates cloud optimization activities seamlessly while customers enjoy the money-saving solution.

ProsperOps data shows this real-time optimization strategy. Clients get guaranteed improved results, including higher discounts than what they previously received from other service providers.

Conclusion

It is common for businesses to have cloud expenses as the most sizable line item on their corporate budgets. With the assistance offered by the top FinOps solutions like Finout, Vantage, KubeCost, Zesty, and ProsperOps, proactive businesses can save money and run more profitable businesses in the cloud. But to truly do FinOps effectively, there also needs to be a culture shift internally that facilitates cross-team communication, no matter which tool you choose.