As organizations mature their FinOps practices—specifically, the process of identifying and executing on cloud cost optimization opportunities—they’re looking into other areas where they can improve the efficiency of their spend.
As these teams look outward, they realize the true total cost of an application is not limited to the infrastructure resources on which it runs, but also includes the cost of the software running on those resources.
As the number of workloads moved to the cloud increases, the number of licensed software packages running in the cloud also increases. Many of these commercial software packages have very different and unique licensing constraints when running in the cloud as compared to running on-premises. However, FinOps teams have historically had no purview into the intricacies of software licensing, as this was the domain of the IT asset management (ITAM) practitioner. So the need for collaboration and integration of these disciplines became apparent.
The goal of Hybrid ITAM and FinOps is to educate practitioners of both disciplines as to the areas where they overlap and intersect, and to provide the tools and guidance to properly establish the true cost of an application. With this visibility comes the ability to identify areas of cost optimization regarding infrastructure, as well as the software running on that infrastructure.