UK GovCloud Best Practices: How to Build a Robust FinOps Community

The Cloud Guide for the Public Sector, published by GOV.UK, supports UK public sector organizations in adopting cloud technology effectively.

Aimed at professionals, it provides resources, policies, and case studies to facilitate cloud implementation.

Since 2013, the Cloud First policy has mandated central government bodies to prioritize public cloud solutions for new or existing services unless non-cloud options are more cost-effective, a practice strongly encouraged across the wider public sector. Proper cloud adoption enhances delivery speed, security, efficiency, and innovation, with examples like the Home Office achieving 40% cost reductions through collaborative strategies.

The guide emphasizes a cross-functional approach, integrating digital, commercial, and security teams to maximize benefits, supported by the One Government Cloud Strategy for coordinated efforts.

It offers guidance on selecting cloud platforms, managing costs through FinOps, and ensuring security with NCSC’s 14 Cloud Security Principles. Training, procurement frameworks like G-Cloud, and communities such as the #cloud Slack channel foster knowledge-sharing.

The Multi-region Cloud and Software-as-a-Service guide covers adopting cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions hosted outside the UK, and the NCSC Cloud Security Collection documents 14 Cloud Security Principles, which guide organizations in assessing and mitigating risks when using cloud services, ensuring compliance with data protection laws like the Data Protection Act 2018.

FinOps

Of course for the public sector ensuring strict controls to manage costs are essential to delivering value for taxpayer monies, highlighting the importance of ‘FinOps’ best practices – a cloud financial management discipline and cultural practice that combines financial management with cloud engineering and operations.

As they describe here GDS has introduced a cloud cost data solution to enhance transparency and reduce public sector cloud spending. With UK public sector cloud expenditure exceeding £1 billion annually and rising, the solution addresses the need for accurate, accessible consumption data, aligning with the blueprint for modern digital government.

The initiative, part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, consolidates cloud cost data from various providers into a standardized format, offering near real-time visualization through a dashboard. Initially, four organizations were onboarded, with plans to expand to more public sector bodies and include additional providers, potentially covering software-as-a-service products like Microsoft 365.

In this presentation Dimitris Perdikou delivers a talk on How to Build a Robust FinOps Community in the Public Sector.