Take control of cloud and AI spend
Cost Control Cost Savings | Accountability | Risk Mitigation | Better Decisions
Competitive Advantage | Enhanced Performance | Continuous Improvement
Extract greater value from your business
Want to spend more wisely and with wider visibility? FinOps is a Cloud & AI financial management discipline and cultural practice that helps you get the most value possible out of your organization by helping you to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions.
This Livingstone Assessment is designed to accurately gauge the efficacy of the processes currently in place across 18 categories. It highlights areas for improvement and provides detailed recommendations to elevate your FinOps maturity, including the implementation of refined, established practices.
Livingstone’s FinOps services provide several key deliverables, including detailed findings with supporting evidence, alignment on future objectives, potential opportunities, and detailed improvement plans.
Firstly, we will provide a clear view of the current state of your FinOps and how it aligns with your organization’s objectives. Then we will deliver an executive presentation with the assessment’s summary findings, supported by a commercial overlay for 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 requirements 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 for dividing a consolidated invoice or bill among those 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 strategies for metadata, hierarchy, and naming standards are used consistently and effectively across the organization.
Multiple data sources will be brought together to allocate shared costs efficiently at the level required by your organization.
Why is Livingstone’s FinOps Assessment unique?
Transformative, not destructive results
The FinOps Assessment establishes an accurate maturity position by combining policy documentation, input from relevant personas, and expertise from a certified FinOps practitioner.
Our Assessment methods enable detailed, directive recommendations by addressing environmental challenges and strategically breaking them down into incremental, prioritized actions. We avoid recommending disruptive changes and focus on the small-but-mighty actions that can offer demonstrable value on a resource investment-versus-cost-impact matrix.
How can enterprises control AI costs?
Enterprises can control AI costs by creating visibility across AI licenses, subscriptions, cloud services, APIs and token consumption, then linking that spend to actual usage and business value. This makes it possible to identify duplicate tools, unused licenses, inefficient consumption, and AI investments that do not deliver sufficient value.
What is AI cost management?
AI cost management is the process of tracking, forecasting, and optimizing the costs associated with enterprise AI. This can include AI software licenses, embedded AI functionality, cloud infrastructure, API usage, tokens, models, and other consumption-based charges.
How can businesses identify shadow AI?
Businesses can identify shadow AI by looking beyond centrally approved applications and examining software inventories, cloud usage, departmental purchases, expense data, and other sources that may reveal unauthorized or unmanaged AI services. Once identified, these tools can be assessed for cost, security, compliance, and business value.
What is AI token cost management?
AI token cost management involves understanding and controlling the consumption-based charges generated when users and applications interact with large language models. Organizations can analyze which models, applications, and use cases consume tokens and determine whether lower-cost models, technical changes, or usage controls can reduce spend.
How do you measure the ROI of enterprise AI?
Enterprise AI ROI should compare the total cost of implementing and operating an AI use case against measurable business outcomes, such as productivity improvements, cost reductions, revenue growth, risk reduction, or improved customer outcomes. Defining these measures before investment makes it easier to determine whether AI initiatives are delivering sufficient value.
