From cloud chaos to control: FinOps puts teams in the driver’s seat

Reader's note

Based on an interview with Lennart van Wijk and published in collaboration with Emerce, this article has been translated for broader reach. Find the original on emerce.nl.

Cloud promises scale and agility, but along the way many organizations lose their grip: rising costs, friction, and a lack of visibility. The FinOps framework restores control by aligning cloud spend with value and ownership.

This year alone, organizations are expected to spend $723 billion on public cloud, according to Gartner, a 21% increase over 2024. Cloud has become the engine behind digital transformation, globalization, and AI adoption. Today, 60% of all enterprise data lives in the cloud. Yet the focus on speed and growth often drives departments and business units to spin up their own cloud environments independently.

The long-term effects: a fragmented infrastructure, ballooning costs, and no clear accountability. The pain rarely shows up at team level, only at the organizational level. Tools exist to scan cloud environments, build inventories, and make recommendations, but those rarely translate into real organizational change.

When cloud needs a rethink

Cloud management depends on your organizational priorities: a growth focus requires a very different approach than business continuity and profit optimization. Shifting that focus changes the equation. Value creation becomes risk management, and growth capacity turns into fine-tuning efficiency.

That summer campaign, for example, should not only be launched but also scaled back or shut down when results do not justify the spend.

Ideally, cloud should be managed with the same discipline as office space or laptops. That requires an organizational shift: from local procurement to shared ownership. This is exactly where FinOps comes in.

FinOps: a community for cloud management

FinOps, short for Cloud Financial Operations, is both a framework and a global community that helps organizations make cloud costs visible, manageable, and predictable. Behind it stands the FinOps Foundation, a non-profit supported by all major cloud providers and more than 15,000 members worldwide, including 93 of the Fortune 100. Membership is free, with a mission centered on sharing knowledge and best practices.

The three core principles of FinOps are:

Everyone owns their cloud usage - Not just finance, but also engineering and product teams must understand and control their consumption.
Teams collaborate - Without IT, finance, and business working together, effective cloud management is impossible.
Optimize for value, not just cost - Cloud optimization is about maximizing business value, not just cutting spend.

These principles form the backbone of FinOps: ownership, collaboration, and value creation.

FinOps in practice

Consider the example of a global FMCG company with dozens of Azure workloads spread across countries and teams, but with little collaboration between IT, finance, and business. Growth was strong, but so was frustration over unexplained cost increases.

Using the FinOps framework, we prioritized the largest environments, analyzed each workload for waste and optimization, and delivered recommendations to cost owners. Improvements were rolled out through the existing change process. The result: significant and sustainable cost savings, greater ownership among product teams, and stronger cross-departmental collaboration as a bonus.

FinOps best practices

Here are proven FinOps practices you can start applying right away:

Make costs visible per workload and owner - Tag workloads, link costs to teams, and visualize them in dashboards accessible to finance. If you cannot measure, you cannot manage.
Start with the biggest cost drivers - A handful of workloads often accounts for most of the bill.
Optimize with quick wins - Shut down idle dev environments outside business hours (saves about 28 percent), prune unused backups, old versions, and oversized resources.
Give teams ownership of their costs - Do not centralize everything. Local accountability accelerates behavioral change.
Coordinate centrally - A lack of central cloud architecture leads to fragmentation and missed economies of scale. Standardize accounts, SLAs, licenses, contracts, and tooling to avoid sprawl.

From optimization to impact

FinOps forces organizations to get a grip on what is running, what it costs, and who is responsible. That makes it the perfect stepping stone to modernization: once waste is clearly visible, you can redesign with intent. FinOps highlights OPEX and provides the business case for CAPEX investment in optimization projects.

The real value of FinOps is not just lower cloud costs; it is better accountability. Cloud is no longer just infrastructure. It is a strategic playing field where companies compete. Only when costs, value, and ownership are transparent and aligned can organizations steer with purpose and capture sustainable advantage.

Cloud then becomes what it promised to be all along: not a black box, but a lever for growth.