Donal Bourke began his career as an ACA, and now works in FinOps in Leeds, UK. He has also launched a YouTube channel advising others who might be considering a move into FinOps.
Did you fall into finops or was it by design the you moved into the area. A keen interest in IT perhaps?
My path to FinOps was a combination of luck and design. While working as an accountant, I enjoyed the people engagement side but was frustrated by the fact that we were often reporting figures after the fact – closing the gate after the horse had bolted so to speak. This prompted my first career pivot into analytics.
My accounting qualification gave me a great understanding of how businesses work and a comfort with numbers. I took this base and built on it through acquiring skills manipulating large data volumes (ETL – Extract transform and Load) and developing data visualisation skills. These skills lead to my first career pivot into sourcing analytics. In this role I built data workflows to allow sourcing managers make better buying decisions based on what we had purchased in the past and planned to purchase in the future.
One of the categories I supported was IT Infrastructure with our largest spend being on public cloud. Given the size of the spend, this area began to focus more and more of my time. The more I learned about the public cloud the more opportunity I saw for someone who can wrangle large data sets, make sense of numbers, and communicate these to the business. I gained my FinOps certification and was approached about a FinOps consulting role in another company which is where I am now.
What skills, intrinsic to an ACA, make you an effective proponent in the FinOps area?
Growth mindset and continuing professional development is a key characteristic when working in the FinOps area. The cloud providers offerings are changing constantly as well as customers' IT infrastructure. All these changes need to be considered and appropriate actions taken to deliver the greatest value to our customers.
What additional training did you have to do?
If I was starting on the learning journey again the key steps I would take are as follows:
Once certified you will have access to the FinOps community to show how to apply what you have learned.
What is your take on the growing convergence between IT and finance/accounting?
The rise of cloud raises a new challenge for finance. Previously, companies had on-premises data centres (private clouds) for which they would raise a Capex request which would go through the various levels of approval before the purchase is made. In the world of cloud, engineers are creating cloud resources with every line of code they write. The developer's priority is to make the system run while cost may be lower down their list. All these charges build on each other in opex leading to a growing cloud bill which may contain a rising level of technical debt. This is where FinOps comes in: to bridge the gap between the technical architecture and financial accountability.
What advantage or differing insights do you have versus your IT professional counterparts in your current team?
Being able to layer business context to the numbers and architecture is a major advantage. For example if a customer's cloud bill jumps all of a sudden, this may be due to a sale or promotion being run by the business. By understanding this context we can make better decisions.
How do you see the area of FinOps evolving in the years ahead ? Is AI a threat to it or a boost?
FinOps as a discipline has only been around since 2019 with earlier incarnations of cloud cost management only being a few years earlier. Given the early stages, the growth and foundational frameworks are still being put in place so it’s very hard to see where it will end. Given the volume of data being generated from cloud providers, data literacy will become more and more important.
I can see AI having two major impacts in the FinOps space:
- AI being used a s a co-pilot to sift through vast data sets to find the anomalies that require action and optimisation
- All these AI models run on the cloud, guess who needs to monitor the efficiency of these cloud environments?… FinOps practitioners!
I would liken it to being a shovel salesperson in California during the gold rush. A FinOps practitioner may not necessarily build the models, but they will be needed now more than ever.
What does a typical month or quarter look like in the FinOps space?
- Daily monitoring of the customer's environment to optimise their cloud commitment mix to maximise savings
- Building data models to improve data points to allow better decisions be made for the above commitments
- Monthly/quarterly customer meetings where architecture changes are discussed to understand future optimisation opportunities
- No month end!!
What career "stepping stones" would you recommend to a newly qualified ACA keen to get into this area?
Much like my own additional learning I mentioned earlier, I'd try to grasp and learn the basic concepts involved in cloud computing; things like the Cloudcast Basics podcasts were helpful to me; The AWS training material can help boost knowledge of the services in a more detailed way; get your head around the terminology and get certified. That's really the key, as it can give you greater access to the community and opportunities within the industry.
- Donal Bourke is a Cloud Optimisation Consultant with NetApp
- Donal's YouTube channel, FinOps for Finance, gives an overview of FinOps, how it relates to finance, and how to pivot into a career in the growing space of cloud optimization.
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