The role of FinOps FOCUS in enhancing cloud cost management and beyond
The role of FinOps FOCUS in enhancing cloud cost management and beyond
FOCUS formalises a standard format for cloud bills, with the intent to simplify the complexities involved in data normalisation.
Published on 30th April 2025
How FinOps FOCUS improves cloud cost management (and now even more areas of your business)
The power and flexibility that the cloud provides has been game-changing for organisations both large and small. It has democratised access to IT resources that would normally have been out of reach for all but the largest organisations. Cloud offerings, which started with the core set of compute, networking, and storage have branched out into services encompassing virtually every corner of the IT landscape–databases, caching, queuing, orchestration, containers, AI and machine learning, just to name a few. And with this enhanced ability to access the vast array of services, comes the ability to accumulate a vast amount of cloud spend. A lot of cloud spend.
Each of the cloud provider services has their own pricing model, and the invoice data for these services takes many forms, none of which are standardised across different cloud providers, and sometimes not even across services within the same provider. This leads to lengthy and complex cloud bills. As an example, multiple customers generate cloud bills that contain several hundred million rows of billing data each month across multiple cloud providers, with different usage, cost, and identifier formats.
Enter cloud cost management.
What is FinOps FOCUS?
To address the complexity of cloud billing and to bring some order to the chaos, the FinOps Foundation has created FinOps FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification). This open-source specification has been embraced by the major cloud vendors (Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, AWS, Oracle Cloud, and most recently, Tencent Cloud) and enables their customers to export their cloud billing data in the standardised FOCUS format.
As a technical specification, FOCUS formalises a standard format for cloud bills, with the intent to simplify the complexities involved in data normalisation. This enables FinOps practitioners, vendors, and the cloud providers themselves to streamline their FinOps practices, and significantly reduce the time and effort required to normalise and then ingest cloud billing data into their systems of record.
How FinOps FOCUS improves cloud cost management
The benefits of adopting the FOCUS format are numerous, and touch all members of the FinOps community:
Cloud providers benefit from the fact that FOCUS eases adoption of the cloud provider services by their customers. If a customer can more readily ingest and inspect their cloud usage data in a known and standardised format, they will have increased visibility into their usage. With that peace of mind, they are more apt to adopt additional services from that provider that follow that same known and understood billing format.
FinOps tool vendors benefit in that the significant effort involved in normalising data from multiple disparate sources into a common format to be used within the vendor’s platform is now reduced with the use of FOCUS. These vendors can shift resources away from the behind-the-scenes plumbing work that is required to normalise and ingest cloud billing data, and instead focus (no pun intended!) those resources on their differentiating services and capabilities.
FinOps practitioners benefit from the use of FOCUS in that they can standardise their queries and their optimisation processes, regardless of where the cloud billing data came from. The skills they have acquired are now portable across cloud vendors, many FinOps tools, and organisations. A FinOps FOCUS certification opens employment prospects across a wide spectrum of opportunities.
