The Rightstack Research DB
FinOps continues to proliferate within companies all over the world (including most of the Fortune 50), enabling cross-functional teams to maximize the value from cloud. As global markets enter challenging times, increasing the return on cloud investments is as important as ever, with FinOps teams ahead of the curve.
Our latest State of FinOps data focuses on performance across key capabilities. Practitioners can compare their own maturity against those of their global peers, encouraging practitioners of all experience levels to improve how they build and practice FinOps.
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2023
What initiatives does your organization use to establish a FinOps culture?
Respondents indicated that providing transparency and reporting around cloud costs are the most popular topics but we still see 61.8% of respondents indicate they are still in the Crawl maturity phase.
2022
2023
Forecasting is happening more frequently
Compared to 2022 frequency of forecasting has increased, with 52% decrease in respondents doing annual forecasting and the biggest increase in those forecasting monthly. This indicates this capability is maturing with over 50% showing they are at Walk or Run levels....
2023
Increase in contractors at higher amounts of cloud spending
FinOps team composition is not a straightforward question answered by maturity level alone. When using a cloud spending lens, our respondents show that external consultants used similarly at all amounts of annual spend. The results indicate dedicated contractors more likely at higher spends, which could hint at companies structure or requiring acceleration in this area...
2023
Mature FinOps teams seem to rely on employees over contractors or consultants
Our 2023 respondents show us that growth of team plans were slowed this year, likely in response to the global economic climate. FinOps team sizes stayed static for respondents at Crawl and Walk phases, whereas Run teams were slightly smaller. What’s notable here is that our most mature practices rely on their dedicated employees over...
2023
Reporting structures become clearer as FinOps practices grow
Respondents in 2023 indicate that CTOs are the most likely role to report to. CIOs leading FinOps teams continue to continued to diminish over time, while CFOs steadily grow in their role as part of the reporting structure. There’s a 64% reduction of those stating that they are still working to define the reporting structure, including...
2023
Top challenges for practitioners shift and evolve in 2023
FinOps challenges continue to shift and evolve, changing how practitioners view and prioritize how they tackle them. Compared to 2022, our 2023 respondents still find that Enabling Engineers to Take Action is a top challenge with a minor 0.5% decrease in percentage of respondents. Unit Economics is a new challenge listed this year, and comes...
2023
FinOps capability priorities change
In 2023, we see shifts in how practitioners prioritize FinOps Capabilities. Establishing a FinOps Culture and Resource Utilization & Rightsizing enter the Top 3, while our respondents deprioritize Data Analysis & Showback, Managing Commitment-based Discounts, and Managing Anomalies. Cost Allocation remains the most prioritized Capability indicating it is fundamental to the FinOps discipline.
2022
2023
More organizations are tackling shared costs
In 2023, we saw more respondents weigh in on how they tackle Shared Costs, indicating that many practitioners are building competency here. Similar to 2022, the Proportional method continues to be the method most used by respondents. Compared to 2022, respondents who indicated they don’t split Shared Costs decreased by 29% as more organizations develop...
2022
2023
Awareness to anomalies remains stable
Our 2023 data indicates that respondents continue to experience similar competency and reactiveness to cloud cost anomalies as they did in 2022. This shows that Managing Anomalies is a maturing capability as some respondents have not been investing the resources to increase maturity and may be comfortable with the level they are currently at. It...
2023
Variance between budget and actual spend
In 2023, we see 48.5% of respondents as Crawl maturity whom reported their variance rates between budget and actual cloud spending. It’s surprising to see a large cohort reporting that they don’t record accuracy at all (20.4%). This means that among the respondents, there’s room for growth in the maturity of the Budget Management and...
2023
Most used data sources for enrichment
In 2023, besides using Cloud Utilization Data to enrich their cloud cost management, respondents also incorporate IT Finance Data and General Business data to better understand the impact of their cloud spend against organizational goals.
2023
Who can self-serve cloud costs reports
It’s exciting to see that a majority of respondents report that their FinOps Practitioners are enabled to self-serve cloud cost reporting. We’re not too surprised to see that Finance and Engineering roles follow. What’s promising is seeing that every persona has the full or partial capability to self-serve reporting as a majority....
2023
How people are facilitating chargeback of cloud cost
It’s interesting to see that in 2023, respondents seem to continue to rely on manual methods to facilitate chargeback, followed by those who report not doing this at all (beating out automation!). Cloud cost chargeback can be difficult, but it’s an important Capability to build and it looks like there’s still a journey ahead for...
2023
How do engineers prefer to consume data for FinOps
Our 2023 respondents show that 40.5% of those who are sharing data with engineers are putting into their tooling or integrated CI/CD. As engineering-focused FinOps initiatives continue to advance, it will be exciting to see the percentage of integrated CI/CD FinOps tooling increase over time. Note: Multi-select, answers total >100%...
2023
Measuring cloud carbon emissions and key performance indicators
There’s much more work to be done with intersecting Sustainability and FinOps, as a majority of respondents indicate that they do not measure cloud carbon emissions from their use of services. Only one in five respondents report measuring carbon emissions, including a minority who are working with various types of sustainability key performance indicators....
2023
The majority are still planning to automate
2023 responses indicate that there’s still a long way to go with automation across a lot of areas as, on average, 50% of respondents are still planning to automate. The high amount of respondents who say they have no plans to automate container rightsizing either indicates they’re not using containers at all, or they don’t...
2023
Other frameworks begin to intersect and integrate with FinOps
Increasing integration of other IT frameworks and FinOps shows a growing cultural shift and challenge. In 2023, there are more conversations in the community around this as FinOps has grown over the last year, attracting practitioners to want to connect other frameworks to help them make sense of and optimize IT investments. ITFM and TBM...
2023
Respondents are strong in Cost Allocation, room for improvement with Rightsizing and Automation
We measured respondents by their benchmarks and sorted them by maturity level. In 2023, practitioners are best at Cost Allocation and activities related to Chargeback or Showback. Our more mature cohort shows strength in Forecasting and Managing Anomalies. Automation and Resource Utilization & Efficiency seem to be heavily worked on by our less experienced cohort....
2023
Majority have low maturity in unit costs capability
Our 2023 respondents show that there’s still much progress to be had across key areas where unit costs can be incorporated. Benchmark wise, nearly 67% are still in the Crawl stage. >Measuring Unit Costs increases in priority for FinOps practitioners, also coming in as one of the top challenges for practitioners, supporting these findings. Note:...
2023
Optimization across all services remains a challenge for everyone
Our 2023 results show Runners (high maturity practitioners) optimize cloud resource utilization through enforced policies. Our lower maturity levels (Walk, Crawl) indicate that they use a hybrid approaches, including formalized engineering processes. Optimization remains a struggle for many as the combined reporting of “We do little or no automation” and “manual/reactive” remain high across all...
2023
FinOps policies and governance show strong adoption
A majority of respondents show mid to high levels of maturity in how they implement and maintain FinOps policies and governance methodologies (51.4% Walk, 14.2% Run). Our 2023 respondents rely upon Allocation Policies, Cost Optimization Policies, and Budget Alerts the most.
2022
Chargeback & Finance Integration (Reporting Cost)
In 2022, 48% of respondents report using Chargeback as their way to report cloud costs. Runners made up 58% of those who use this method.
2022
Workload Management & Automation
Respondents in 2022 reported an increase in automation compared to previous data. From all our respondents who automate, budget overage notifications, reporting, and tagging hygiene are the most common things to automate. Runners led the way in automation involving rightsizing, containerization, and making the most of savings plans and discounted rates.
2022
Measuring Unit Costs
“Budgeting and Forecasting Accuracy,” “Enabling FinOps Culture,” and “Enabling Executing Decision Making” represented the main ways in which our respondents utilize Unit Cost reports and analyses in 2022. It’s also interesting to see nearly one in four respondents indicate that they don’t use Unit Costs, showing some room for improvement as FinOps practice continue to...
2022
Resource Utilization & Efficiency (Services)
In 2022, practitioners reported mainly utilizing cloud service virtualized instances. Newer pre-crawl respondents represent a large part of this data. Walkers and Runners represent more container and serverless usage, though both are a smaller portion of their overall compute spend.
2022
Resource Utilization & Efficiency
A minority of our respondents indicate massive at-scale utilization (represented as Runners), with 24% being the majority at 1000 to 5000 instances. Businesses and their cloud use come in all shapes and sizes, so there’s no surprise to see a blended representation across the board.
2022
Managing Commitment-based Discounts (maturity)
2022 respondents reported advanced practitioners (Runners) minimizing their use of on-demand pricing and making the most of commitment-based discounts. It’s also notable to see that of Pre-crawl FinOps practitioners reporting in, 36% reported already using commitment-based discounts and 19% using spot instances.
2022
Managing Commitment-based Discounts
Most 2022 respondents informed us that anywhere from 0 to 10 percent of their discounts going unused (Walkers and Runners). However, zero percent could also mean that the analysis and purchase of commitment-based discounts is deficient for the organization. New practitioners who identify as Pre-crawl report waste as high as 30 percent, showing much room...
2022