What Makes FOCUS the Right Tool for Multi-Cloud Billing Data?

The current organizations are focusing on multi-cloud strategies to assist them achieve better results in this period of higher innovation. The main benefit of utilizing numerous cloud providers is that there are more operational concerns, especially regarding the bill. Despite this, there is a way to counterbalance it, and that is through embracing the FinOps – Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) to effectively meet these challenges. This article will describe why FOCUS is necessary to meet the difficulties of multi-cloud billing data and how it is feasible to apply this concept to enhance cloud cost management in organizations.  

A Guide to the Multi-Cloud Environment  

In this case, before elaborating on the benefits of FOCUS, there is a need to proactively define what a multi-cloud environment is. Multi-cloud is the strategy when organizations use services from several cloud providers like AWS, Azure, GCP, etc., to reduce risks of sole reliance on one vendor, achieve the desired performance, and align the offered solutions with organizations’ needs. However, this approach can lead to:  

1. Complex Billing Structures: Various cloud providers have certain performance indices, revenue charge methods, and service types that complicate this process and can lead to extra costs.

2. Data Silos: Every organization can experience the problem of managing the billing data from several providers, and therefore, there are no ideal ways to handle costs efficiently.

3. Inconsistent Metrics: The terminology and metrics used are not universal, making it difficult to quantify the actual costs of various service providers.  

For this reason, to take full advantage of the bill data information, it is more important to have a standard of the bill data mentioned above. 

What is FOCUS?  

The FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification, or FOCUS, was created by the FinOps Foundation to set up similar billing information across cloud providers. This effort is meant to standardize the language around cost and usage data, allowing organizations to gain more insight into their cloud expenses.  

Fig 1: FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification

Key Features of FOCUS  

1. Standardized Dimensions and Attributes: FOCUS defines dimensions (e.g., resource type, usage type) and attributes of the cloud billing data, and each can be seen as having conforming data for analysis and reporting.  

2. Vendor-Neutral Framework: FOCUS is built as a cloud vendor agnostic, meaning that integrating this data from different sources and following different processes for each vendor is not necessarily feasible.

3. Open-Source Community: It is a community-oriented effort designed to encourage feedback and receive input from actual practitioners in various fields to ensure the initiative adapts to users.  

The Importance of FOCUS for Multi-Cloud Billing  

Reduced data on Unified Billing Data between Providers  

This means that one of FOCUS's advantages is the consolidation of billing data coming from different cloud providers. As to the proposed views, there is a chance to bring together an organization’s billing information in one schema. This approach makes it easier to compare their costs since they merge all into a single platform.  

Example: Since an organization may use AWS storage, Azure computing, and GCP machine learning, FOCUS enables consistent expenditure observations of all these services. It also results in more effective functional budgeting and more accurate functional predictions. This not only makes financial reporting less complex but also increases the transparency of surfaced cloud expenditures, benefiting the comprehensive understanding of all the stakeholders. 

Improved Cost Allocation  

Another area is cost control, especially learning where cloud expenditures are being made and what department or project is causing them. To this end, factors such as FOCUS make the cost allocation more specific, as all costs are encoded and classified similarly. 

Fig 2: FOCUS Billing Data

Use Case: Suppose an organization involves many departments, each with one or more cloud services. Focusing on finance, through FOCUS, it is possible to charge organizational units according to the resources they use and carry out internal extramural charging. This assists departments in better monitoring their economic resource spending and ensures prudent resource use.

Applying best practices in allocation means that every organization is equal to its cloud cost expense and creates a culture of cost responsibility.  

1. Better Correcting and Predicting
   Estimating cloud costs is challenging, and many companies are unclear about this when they operate in a multi-cloud environment. FOCUS achieves a standardized metric and dimensions across the organization, which enhances the development of better budgets and forecasts.

2. Predictive Analytics
   This allows organizations to use predictive metrics of analytic usage consistency to predict future spending on the unified dataset. It helps avoid ill-advised expenses, whereby a company planning for a particular year admins a certain sum of money and will not end up using all the money because of its forecasting associated with it. Standard and up-to-date data is essential for enabling an organisation to meet new business needs because it makes budgeting more flexible and adaptable.

3. Simplified Reporting

   When working with different providers, creating reports for cloud expenses can become quite time-consuming. What is more, it saves a lot of time for reporting since FOCUS provides a more standardized format of data to ensure better overall report generation.

4. Automated Reporting Tools
   Firms can utilize automated reporting that uses FOCUS-compliant data to provide real-time analytics on an organization's spending habits. This capability is useful for stakeholders needing up-to-date information to take strategic action. Third, the use of standardized reporting formats also means that teams spend minimal time and effort preparing reports and can devote more time to the analysis portions of a project.

5. Improved Inter-Terity Cooperation
   Cloud expenses usually relate to the organization’s finance, engineering, and operations departments. FOCUS builds the shared context for cloud billing, making it easy for different groups with multidimensionally related interests to cooperate.

6. Cross-Departmental Communication
   As such, this language enables conversation between teams on costs, usage, and optimizations without interference from various terms used in the organization. This simplification enhances financial responsibility across the organization and makes every team consider the cost implications of its activities. First, the cycle of financial planning will enable improved collaboration between various departments within an organisation, and this will enable everybody in the organization to have a common end view about the organisation’s financial planning.

7. Increased Accountability
   FOCUS lets organizations take responsibility for cloud expenditures. With a defined format, it becomes easy to identify who is authorized to use which costs, leading to conscious utilization of cloud services.

8. Usage Segmentation
   If internal chargeback for resource usage is practised within the FOCUS guidelines, the costs can be distributed to the departments or teams that incur them. This accountability incentivizes teams to optimize their resource usage and manage costs effectively. Greater accountability leads to thoughtful resource allocation and encourages teams to discuss cost management and optimization strategies.