2023Finops foundation report.pdf
What's new in FinOps in 2023?
Check out some of the top trends from the State of FinOps 2023 report.
Zesty
Source: State of FinOps by FinOps Foundation
A growing number of businesses are forecasting on a monthly rather than annual basis. This takes time away from other aspects of their job.
| Year | % of Respondents |
|---|---|
| 2022 | 50 |
| 2023 | 49 |
| 45 | |
| 40 | |
| 35 | |
| 30 | |
| 25 | |
| 20 | |
| 15 | |
| 10 | |
| 6 | |
| 11 | |
| 27 | |
| 33 | |
| 23 | |
| 19 | |
| 9 | |
| 0 | |
| Weekly | |
| Monthly | |
| Quarterly | |
| Bi-annual | |
| Annually |
Organizations are still struggling with key cultural & technical aspects of FinOps.
| Challenges | % of Respondents |
|---|---|
| Empowering engineers to take action | 29.5% |
| Getting to unit economics | 27.9% |
| Organizational adoption of FinOps | 27.9% |
| Reducing waste or unused resources | 27.9% |
| Implementing FinOps governance & policy at scale | 27% |
| Accurate forecasting of spend | 24.3% |
| Full allocation of cloud spending | 18.5% |
| Enabling automation | 18.3% |
| Container cost reporting | 13.3% |
| Leadership buy-in of FinOps | 12.4% |
| 0% | |
| 5% | |
| 10% | |
| 15% | |
| 20% | |
| 25% | |
| 30% | |
| 35% |
As practitioners prioritize FinOps capabilities, cost allocation remains the most prioritized, indicating its fundamental importance to the discipline.
| Capabilities | % of Respondents |
|---|---|
| Cost allocation (tags, labels & hierarchy) | 9.46% |
| Establish FinOps culture | 9.27% |
| Resource utilization & rightsizing | 9.09% |
| Forecasting | 8.54% |
| Budget management | 8.47% |
| Data analysis & showback | 8.2% |
| Manage commitment-based discount | 8.01% |
| Manage anomalies | 7.53% |
| Chargeback & finance integration | 7.09% |
| Manage shared cost | 7.08% |
| Measure unit costs | 6.7% |
| Workload management & automation | 6.38% |
| Data normalization | 5.1% |
| Intersection with other frameworks | 4.07% |
| 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 |
Respondents at various stages of FinOps adoption still see significant discrepancies between their cloud budgets and actual spend.
| Variance | % of Respondents |
|---|---|
| 1-5% | 40% |
| 5-10% | 35% |
| 10-20% | 35.9% |
| 20+% | 30% |
| Don't record accuracy | 25% |
| 20% | |
| 15% | |
| 15.6% | |
| 20.6% | |
| 20.4% | |
| 10% | |
| 7.6% | |
| 0% |
Respondents excel in cost allocation, but need improvement in rightsizing & automation.
| Areas for Improvement | % of Respondents |
|---|---|
| Cost allocation | |
| Managing shared cost | |
| Chargeback & finance integration | |
| Forecasting | |
| Managing anomalies | |
| Budget management | |
| Cloud policy & governance | |
| Data analysis & showback | |
| Establishing FinOps culture | |
| Resource utilization & efficiency | |
| Data ingestion & normalization | |
| Measuring unit costs | |
| Managing commitment based discounts | |
| FinOps & intersecting frameworks | |
| FinOps education & enablement | |
| Automation & workload management |
% of Respondents: 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80%
Crawl Walk Run
Automation in FinOps is still in its infancy.
About 50% of organizations plan to implement this technology.
| Technology | No plans to automate | Planning to automate | Automated |
|---|---|---|---|
| Notifications/alerts of anomalies | 5.7 | 55 | 39.3 |
| Reports of cloud usage | 8.3 | 52.7 | 39 |
| Tagging policy compliance | 14.2 | 54.5 | 31.3 |
| Resource utilization management | 29.6 | 53.6 | 16.8 |
| Notifications/alerts for going over budget | 11.1 | 50.2 | 38.7 |
| Instance rightsizing | 37.3 | 50 | 12.8 |
| Creating or adjusting budgets | 40 | 79.9 | 10.2 |
| Applying data retention policies | 32.3 | 48.3 | 19.5 |
| Container rightsizing | 43 | 46.9 | 10.1 |
| Savings Plans/RI/CUD Management | 41.9 | 40.9 | 17.1 |
% Respondents: 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
Optimization of services still remains a challenge across the board. Even for mature organizations, cloud resource optimization is still a struggle.
| Service | No optimization | Little optimization | Moderate optimization | Significant optimization | Full optimization |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Compute instances | 9.8 | 5.4 | 16.6 | 18.4 | 25.7 |
| Data & storage | 13.5 | 7.3 | 18.7 | 13.7 | 25.4 |
| Database | 15.7 | 5.5 | 21.3 | 11.5 | 28.1 |
| Backup & retention | 17.8 | 11.8 | 16.5 | 21.5 | 18.4 |
| Containers | 18.8 | 2.9 | 19.3 | 16.6 | 23.5 |
| Data transfer & networking | 27.1 | 5.4 | 19.5 | 8.3 | 25.3 |
| Hybrid | 29.6 | 3.2 | 16.2 | 8.6 | 22.9 |
| Serverless | 30.7 | 2.8 | 15.2 | 16.2 | 20.1 |
| Analytics services | 32.4 | 2.8 | 15.8 | 9.7 | 21.9 |
% Respondents: 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
We do little to no optimization Enforced policy Engineering process
Automation Manual/Reactive Combined approach
Curious about other FinOps trends in 2023?
Zesty
Check out the full report at State of FinOps by FinOps Foundation