FinOps - Forecasting Cloud Costs

As businesses grow their spend in the public cloud to accelerate innovation and to build a competitive advantage, predicting cloud growth accurately short- to long-term becomes increasingly important for leadership. Finance and executives need to know available funds several years into the future to build their innovation roadmap.

In this lesson, you are going to learn about cloud forecasting and how to align forecasting models with the maturity of your FinOps / Cloud Financial Management practice. You will learn about the relevant terms and concepts as well as how to identify ownership and accountability. We will break down the challenge into addressable parts and walk you through solution approaches at each step.

Learning Objectives

• Understand what cloud forecasting is and why it's important
• Understand what challenges exist in cloud forecasting and how to address them
• Learn about the different ways you can forecast in the cloud
• Learn about what you can do to improve cloud forecasting
• Learn about the role forecasting plays in FinOps

Intended Audience

• This lesson is for FinOps / Cloud Financial Management and Finance people looking to understand how to improve cloud forecasting and how to increase forecast accuracy.

Prerequisites

A basic understanding of how the cloud works, including compute and storage services and their pricing models, as well as an understanding of the financial processes around forecasting, budgeting, procurement, and allocations.