Understanding FinOps in Healthcare
“Getting FinOps right for healthcare organizations is crucial,” says Rick Vanover, senior director of product strategy at Veeam.
He explains that a common business model is having different groups partner with each other internally.
For example, platform operations (PlatformOps) teams will partner with DevOps teams to run sprints in a coordinated fashion, with the security team (SecOps) keeping watch.
“FinOps can have a seat at the table as a shared service across the organization — think of it as a finance project management organization,” Vanover says.
Danny Assaban, principal solutions engineer at Trend Micro, notes that healthcare becomes an even more complex industry when striving to meet regulatory compliance requirements within strict budgets.
“Any tool or framework that addresses accurate forecasts of expenses will ultimately assist in budgeting as well,” he says. “A FinOps approach brings together IT, finance and operations to effectively use cloud services within those defined budgets.”
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Cloud Financial Management Best Practices
Assaban says most importantly, healthcare organizations must do the “prework” to appropriately define the financial and operational goals they hope to achieve via FinOps and cloud services. Vital to this effort is an efficient method to quickly and accurately trace back cloud costs to specific departments or teams, and ultimately to specific budgets.
“We’re seeing more organizations embrace automation,” he explains. “Its use in monitoring is one practical example.”
He adds that organizations will find it vital to be alerted immediately about unusual or unexpected usage that can otherwise quickly add up. This requires regular reporting that will give teams and budget owners the opportunity to review costs and usage, and maintain course with budgets.
“Lastly, and especially relevant to the healthcare industry, is to prioritize compliance requirements,” he says.
From Vanover’s perspective, the fundamental best practice for a healthcare organization is to align the cloud model with the implementation.
“The cloud-powered solution must meet expectations in terms of financial viability, security profile, performance, usability and more,” he says. “This is absolutely critical; if a solution is implemented and these criteria are not met, it’s often too late to fix the issues effectively.”