As organizations continue to move their operations to cloud services, it is becoming increasingly important for information security and risk management teams to understand how they can support financial operations (FinOps). FinOps is a management practice that promotes shared responsibility for an organization’s cloud computing infrastructure and cloud cost management. In this post, we will explore some ways in which the information security and risk management team can support FinOps initiatives.

1. Establishing Governance: Information security and risk management teams can play a vital role in helping FinOps teams establish effective governance. This includes creating a framework for budget management, setting up policies and procedures for cloud resource usage, and ensuring that all cloud infrastructure is secure and meets compliance requirements.

2. Security Awareness Training: Information security and risk management teams can provide security awareness training to ensure that all cloud practitioners are aware of the importance of secure cloud computing practices. This includes data protection, authentication protocols, encryption standards, and other security measures.

3. Cloud Rate Optimization: Information security and risk management teams can help FinOps teams identify areas of cost optimization. This includes analyzing cloud usage data to identify opportunities for cost savings, recommending risk-based ways to optimize server utilization, and helping determine the most appropriate pricing model for specific services or applications.

4. Sharing Incident Response, Disaster Recovery, and Business Continuity Insights: Information security and risk management teams can help FinOps teams respond to cloud environment incidents quickly and effectively by providing technical support in the event of a breach or outage. This includes helping to diagnose the issue, developing mitigations or workarounds, and providing guidance on how to prevent similar incidents in the future. The data from the DR/BC plans are also highly relevant to the FinOps team mission and can be used as a roadmap for asset prioritization, process relationships, and data flows.

5. Compliance Management: Information security and risk management teams can help FinOps teams stay compliant with relevant regulations by managing audits and reporting requirements, ensuring that all relevant security controls are in place, auditing existing procedures, developing policies for data protection, and providing guidance on how to ensure compliance with applicable laws.

The bottom line is this: By leveraging the shared data and experience of the risk management and information security teams, FinOps teams can ensure their operations are secure, efficient, and completely aligned with the organization’s overall risk and security posture. This adds value to the work of all three teams in the triad. By working together, the teams can significantly enhance the maturity around technology business management functions. All-in-all, by working together, the teams can create significantly better business outcomes.