First Horizon's FinOps as a Service platform is meticulously crafted to streamline cloud spending for organizations, delivering a blend of clarity, purpose, and financial accountability in the management of cloud expenditures.

The First Horizon FinOps journey is a dynamic and iterative process composed of three key phases: Inform, Optimize, and Operate. Companies can find themselves in multiple phases simultaneously, depending on the specific business unit, application, or team involved in the journey. This flexibility allows organizations to tailor their approach to cloud cost management based on their unique needs and priorities.

Inform:

• In this initial phase, organizations focus on gaining visibility into their cloud costs and usage.
• They collect and analyze data to generate accurate spend and usage reports. Stakeholders gain insights into cloud expenditures and can benchmark performance against industry standards.
• Real-time visibility into spending is established, and financial forecasting and planning begin.

Optimize:

• The optimization phase centers around strategic decision-making to enhance cost efficiency.
• Organizations define forecasts and budgets to better manage cloud expenses.
• They identify opportunities for usage optimization and resource rightsizing based on actual needs.
• Cloud cost optimization is integrated into the software development lifecycle, and trade-offs between cost, quality, and speed are considered.

Operate:

• In the operate phase, organizations continue to fine-tune their cloud cost management strategies.
• Teams and individuals take ownership of their cloud usage and costs, from architecture design to ongoing operations.
• Decentralized decision-making around cost-effective architecture, resource usage, and optimization is promoted.
• Businesses consider cost as a key efficiency metric from the start of the software development lifecycle.
• The focus remains on aligning cloud usage with business objectives and driving innovation.

By recognizing that different business units, applications, or teams may be at varying stages of the FinOps journey, organizations can effectively tailor their cloud cost management efforts to address specific needs, ensuring that each phase contributes to overall cost efficiency and value optimization.