Take control of cloud and AI spend

Livingstone’s FinOps services provide several key deliverables, which include detailed findings with supporting evidence, alignment of future objectives, potential opportunities and detailed improvement plans.

Firstly, we will provide a clear view of the current status of your FinOps, and how that aligns with the objectives of your organization. Then we will deliver an executive presentation with the summary findings of the assessment supported by the commercial overlay of improving FinOps and a roadmap to achieve the outcomes.

You get a detailed report across each assessment area, measured across each lens. The report will highlight areas of strength and potential improvement.

Our dependencies are designed to limit the resource requirement on your side while providing the maximum value we can to your organization.

These include:

Resources

Access to key stakeholders as outlined in the key personas. Interviews will be carried out and documented.

Executive Support

Support from leadership to ensure engagement throughout the assessment and to consume the deliverables and recommendations.

Data

Access to the Cloud environment as well as any existing process and policy documentation of FinOps-related reporting.

Cost Allocation is the set of practices to divide up a consolidated invoice or bill among those who are responsible for its various parts.

With Livingstone’s Crawl Phase, your cost allocation may include dividing the total bill by account, project or subscription where a list of these is known to belong to a specific cost center or business unit.

If you are at a Walk Maturity, your mechanisms for allocating costs are well-established and varied, but they may not be used consistently or universally, and some shared costs or unallocated costs may still exist. Meanwhile, the granularity of your cost allocation will likely be at an application or service level.

Walk phase cost allocation usually includes a combination of factors, such as accounts, projects or subscriptions, which are identified by metadata or naming standards as belonging to specific cost centers, resources within shared cost pools which can be identified as belonging to a particular cost center, and some mechanisms for the distribution of shared costs.

If your organization is at a Run Maturity level, costs will be allocable to as granular a level as required, with direct allocation or consistent mechanisms for distributing shared cost items, and the strategies for metadata, hierarchy and naming standards are being used consistently and effectively universally.

Multiple sources of data will be brought together to allocate shared costs efficiently at the level necessary for your organization.

Why is Livingstone’s FinOps Assessment unique?

Transformative, not destructive results

The FinOps Assessment curates an accurate maturity position by combining policy documentation, knowledge from the relevant personas, and expertise from a certified FinOps practitioner.

Our Assessment methods enable detailed and directive recommendations by accepting challenges in the environment and strategically breaking down our recommendations into incremental and prioritized actions. We avoid recommending disruptive changes and focus on the small-but-mighty actions that can offer demonstrable value against a resource investment versus cost impact matrix.