Why modern businesses need FinOps
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Why modern businesses need FinOps
Dan Chalk
Published on 26 September 2025
6 min read
Dan Chalk
Published on 26 September 2025
6 min read
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Why modern businesses need FinOps
The pillars of FinOps
How FinOps can benefit your business
Your journey and where to begin
Value at your fingertips
Unlock your Cloud potential today!
Explore FinOps strategies to reduce cloud costs, with real-world AWS savings examples and an explanation of why they matter for modern businesses.
In this blog miniseries, we're exploring the importance of incorporating the practice of financial operations (FinOps) to optimise management and cloud spending. This includes practical strategies to reduce cloud costs and real-world examples of how we've helped organisations deliver significant AWS Cloud savings.
But first, let's take a closer look at FinOps and explore why it's essential for modern businesses.
Why modern businesses need FinOps
Financial maturity has always been an important part of day-to-day business. However, since the introduction of cloud services, such as AWS, GCP, Azure, and others, many or most financial controls and procurement processes have been either lost or bypassed. This can cause cloud spending to be improperly allocated, savings not to be realised, and potentially lead to spending spiralling out of control.
FinOps is a framework and cultural practice for maximising the value from technology, including cloud services. It focuses on enabling teams to make data-driven decisions and improve financial accountability.
The pillars of FinOps
FinOps is built on three core pillars:
- Inform: providing visibility into cloud costs and usage to all stakeholders.
- Optimise: identify and implement strategies to reduce unnecessary cloud spending.
- Operate: continuously improving cloud financial management through ongoing monitoring, automation, and governance.
How FinOps can benefit your business
1. Control and optimisation
Let's start with the reason you're probably reading this: you want better visibility and control over your cloud spending. It's possible that you're not tagging your resources properly or that you haven't developed a strategy for tags, labels, workload segmentation, and therefore you're not getting the value you want. Perhaps you're not using savings plans or reservations, and there's also a chance you're over-provisioned.
You may want one or more of the following outcomes:
- Visibility and reporting by business segmentations, SKUs, products, and environments.
- The right amount of compute power, suitable for your workloads.
- Savings plans or reservations to further optimise your spending.
2. Enhance or retain business agility
Your teams are probably already agile when working in the cloud; FinOps should not create constraints or stifle innovation. Instead, FinOps fosters a culture of cost-conscious innovation.
By providing real-time visibility into spend, teams can continue to iterate, experiment, and deploy applications with a better understanding of their financial impact, thereby creating a greater sense of ownership and resulting in improved outcomes.
3. Improved collaboration across teams
FinOps bridges this gap by promoting cross-functional collaboration. With finance, business, and engineering units working effectively together, you can align cloud investments with strategic business objectives, leading to more informed decisions and better outcomes.
This is especially transformational when it comes to connecting finance teams with engineering. They're often kept several steps apart in technology organisations, but FinOps helps bring them together. Both teams end up with a better understanding of the tradeoffs in producing real outcomes for the business, and previously combative relationships start to add value in new ways.
4. Data-driven decision-making
FinOps is inherently data-driven. By leveraging detailed cost and usage data, organisations can make informed decisions about cloud architecture, resource allocation, and investment priorities. This analytical approach enables businesses to move away from guesswork and toward strategic financial planning for their cloud infrastructure.
5. Accountability and transparency
With FinOps, every team and individual involved in cloud consumption becomes accountable for their spending. This transparency creates a sense of ownership and encourages responsible resource utilisation. It transforms cloud cost management from a reactive exercise into a proactive and continuous effort.
Your journey and where to begin
FinOps is about creating a cultural practice – it's important to understand this will be a journey of continuous improvement.
- Start with visibility: you need to understand your spending to create impactful change.
- Identify quick wins: target high-impact savings and optimisations that can generate some momentum.
- Engage with key stakeholders: not only does this help build momentum, but it also creates measurable goals for the future.
- Educate and empower: put information and tools into the hands of teams, enabling them to create change.
- Establish feedback loops: monitor your progress and iterate.
Want practical strategies to start reducing your cloud costs today? Read the next blog in this series right now – it's packed with practical advice to help you take control of your cloud spend.
Value at your fingertips
FinOps transforms the way organisations manage cloud spend by turning cost data into actionable insight. It aligns finance, engineering, and operations to optimise resources, reduce waste, and ensure every cloud spend drives measurable business value—enabling smarter investments, predictable budgets, and sustainable innovation.
Unlock your cloud potential today!
Stop overspending on the cloud. Talk to our FinOps experts today and turn your cloud costs into a competitive advantage
Written by
Engineering Manager
With over 15 year's experience in product teams and consulting across private and public sectors, Daniel leads teams specialising in platform and data engineering, helping clients achieve their goals.