FinOps Archives - EasySAM https://easysam.co.uk/tag/finops/ Software Asset Management. Simplified. Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:38:16 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://easysam.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/easysam_icon-60x60.png FinOps Archives - EasySAM https://easysam.co.uk/tag/finops/ 32 32 Making smarter FinOps tooling choices in 2026 https://easysam.co.uk/knowledge-base/making-smarter-finops-tooling-choices-in-2026/ Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:46:00 +0000 https://easysam.co.uk/?p=37331 As cloud spending continues to rise, so does waste. So, the question isn't whether you have a FinOps tool...but whether that tool is fit for purpose.

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As cloud spending continues to rise, so does waste. So, the question isn't whether you have a FinOps tool...but whether that tool is fit for purpose.

Published on 23rd April 2026

Cloud spending continues to rise, but waste remains a stubborn issue. Global spending on cloud infrastructure services reached $102.6bn in the third quarter of 2025, growing 25% year on year as enterprises moved from early artificial intelligence experiments towards large-scale deployment.

At the same time, priorities are changing. As cloud environments grow in scale and complexity, organisations are placing greater scrutiny on how infrastructure spending is managed and controlled. The market for FinOps tooling has grown in parallel, but more choices do not always translate to clarity.

The question for 2026 is not whether a company has a FinOps tool, but whether that tool is fit for purpose.

Beyond tracking the bill

Early FinOps practices were designed to track spend. While this remains true today, it’s no longer enough, as retrospective reporting does usually not prevent overspending.

As the business world evolves, tools should evolve with them, and instead of only showing what was spent, platforms should support forecasting, budgeting, and automated governance. These capabilities influence behaviour before the money leaves the account. They allow finance and engineering teams to work with the same data and the same targets, allowing accountability to be spread across the business.

To no surprise, cutting costs is important, but FinOps should also show whether cloud spend is paying off for the business. That means tracking the full journey of an application, from when it’s launched to when it’s retired, and weighing up cost against performance and sustainability.

Many organisations started doing this through unit economics, where costs are broken down per customer, transaction, or service. It gives a clearer picture of value, but only if the data coming from FinOps tools is accurate. Without that, it’s impossible to see whether an application is worth what it costs.

Fragmented tools create blind spots

Cloud-native tools are often the starting point as they are low-cost, accessible, and easy to adopt. But they also stop at the borders of a single provider. Most organisations now run multiple clouds, SaaS contracts and licensing agreements. A tool that only sees part of this picture will often miss these expanding costs.

Point solutions can create similar problems. A forecasting tool here, an anomaly detection service there. It appears manageable at first – but stitching everything together can be slow and difficult to make sense of, which means gaps can creep in and visibility can shrink.

What effective FinOps tooling should deliver

There are a few criteria that separate tools which simply report spend from those that actually help manage it.

Forecasting and budget planning should be accurate enough to support business decisions, not just technical ones. Governance should be automated so that policies apply consistently across teams without needing constant manual oversight. Additionally, allocation models should make it clear which department or application owns the cost, because shared accountability is only possible when responsibility is visible.

Integration matters as much as functionality. FinOps can no longer operate in isolation; they need to connect with IT asset management and licensing systems to provide a more comprehensive view of ownership and usage.

Usability plays a critical role. If engineering teams do not see value in the data, or if the interface is too complex to use daily, the tool is unlikely to deliver meaningful results.

Culture, cost, and collaboration

FinOps is not just a finance project, as it only works when responsibility is spread across functions.

In practise, this means working cross-functionally, and finance needs to see how architectural choices affect budgets. Engineers need access to real-time data that makes costs visible without slowing delivery, and leadership needs to frame this not as a cost-cutting exercise, but as a way to make better use of resources.

That cultural element is also where sustainability comes in. Many organisations already track or plan to track their cloud carbon footprint. That creates an additional layer of accountability: environmental as well as financial. FinOps can provide the framework to bring both together, but only if the tools support it.

Looking to 2026

The landscape is not getting simpler. AI workloads, edge deployments, containers and SaaS all make the picture more complex. Companies that continue to rely on basic cost trackers will remain reactive, spotting waste only after it happens.

The organisations that will succeed in 2026 are those that treat FinOps as more than an accounting function. They will use tools that integrate across the environment, provide accurate forecasting, and connect financial accountability with engineering and operations. They will back this with a culture that shares responsibility for spend.

FinOps is moving fast – adoption is rising, waste is still significant, and priorities are shifting towards efficiency and value. The question for leaders is whether their tooling keeps pace with this shift, or whether it risks leaving them behind.

Sound like a familiar situation?

Your tool of choice not fit for purpose? Or maybe you don't have a tool at all?

Why not get in touch to see what advice we can offer?

Get in touch

Source

https://aijourn.com/making-smarter-finops-tooling-choices-in-2026/

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Muhammad Nur via Vecteezy

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]]> 5 real-world FinOps use cases to maximise ROI https://easysam.co.uk/knowledge-base/5-real-world-finops-use-cases-to-maximise-roi/ Wed, 25 Mar 2026 10:09:00 +0000 https://easysam.co.uk/?p=37186 Learn how some companies have saved up to 60% and driven innovation with a transformation of their cloud cost management.

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FinOps

Learn how some companies have saved up to 60% and driven innovation with a transformation of their cloud cost management.

Published on 25th March 2026

Enterprises continue to waste money due to mismanaged cloud infrastructure. The automated nature of cloud tooling makes it easier to scale inefficient or unused infrastructure more quickly.

Flexera’s State of the Cloud report found that 27% of cloud spend continues to be wasted despite optimisation efforts.

By adopting FinOps practices, enterprises can overcome the challenges associated with inefficient cloud spend. It adds an operational and cross-enterprise collaboration element to cloud cost management tooling.

A primary driver for FinOps is developing enterprise workflows to align cloud spending with usage, thereby saving money. It can also help streamline processes and help set expectations for savings and other positive changes.

Titus M, practice director at Everest, an advisory firm, observed that organisations that reach mature FinOps maturity consistently realise cost reductions of 20-60%, improve cost predictability and forecasting, accelerate decision-making through embedded cost awareness, and achieve operational excellence through automation and visibility. This provides a strategic advantage through accurate service pricing and ROI calculations, enabling agile resource deployment and a faster market response.

Titus M said, “We have seen enterprises reach a reasonable amount of maturity within 12-18 months. Now we are reaching a stage in the market where cost predictability and cultural transformation are becoming mainstream.”

Here are some use cases where enterprises are starting to see the value of FinOps practices.

1. Tagging governance to drive savings & availability

Ouribank, a fintech leader in financial services in Brazil, worked to focus its FinOps strategy. When they started, cost visibility remained fragmented across development, operations and finance teams. Rather than pursuing immediate cost cuts, they followed the FinOps Foundation’s framework for a phased roadmap, which was stewarded by a dedicated FinOps specialist.

They prioritised low-operational quick wins in numerous ways, including:

  • Shutting down idle resources
  • Automating development and test environment shutdowns during off-hours
  • Migrating AWS ECS Fargate workloads from on-demand to spot pricing
  • Reducing over-provisioned resources
  • Implementing Amazon S3 lifecycle policies
  • Upgrading Amazon EBS volumes to gp3 with optimised IOPS allocation

The second phase focused on structured Savings Plans and Reserved Instances purchases for medium-term resource needs. In the first year, they:

  • Reduced cloud costs by 60%
  • Increased availability and processing capacity by 18%
  • Scaled cost tagging from 0% to 94%

“Tagging governance serves as the foundation for chargeback maturity, enabling precise cost attribution at granular levels,” said Titus M. This phased crawl, walk and run approach typically requires 12-18 months from initial visibility to mature chargeback operations.

2. Centralised FinOps for infrastructure optimisation

Aykut Duman, a partner in Kearney’s Digital & Analytics practice, worked with one leading US telco to guide its FinOps journey. This process involved a cross-disciplinary focus on cost analysis, allocation and optimisation across multiple cloud environments. The groundwork helped the telco link visibility and context across billing, workloads and consumption data.

The multidisciplinary aspect involved working with finance, IT and procurement teams. It has also improved the ability to allocate cloud costs to specific workloads and business owners. Multiple people can collaborate to identify and pursue rightsizing opportunities by taking advantage of reservations and savings plans. Duman said they are realising savings of 5-10% and have achieved about 1% variance in budget accuracy.

3. Turning cost into an engineering signal

Philipp Jung, a senior partner in Kearney’s Digital & Analytics practice, worked with a leading digital media company on a project to improve developer cost visibility to drive behaviour change. The first step was to find ways to embed cost data directly into engineering workflows and to incentivise their use.

“The aim wasn’t only to cut spending but to make cost a first-class engineering signal like latency or reliability,” said Jung.

The company reported saving millions within the first few months of making costs visible and actionable. A key insight was finding ways to surface cost data directly into the engineering team’s existing tools. This allowed developers to see and prioritise cost optimisations associated with products without leaving their tools.

4. Improving governance across the enterprise

Will Thomas, managing director and cloud optimisation lead at Protiviti, recently conducted a proof-of-value engagement with a client that had adopted a FinOps tool. Nearly immediately, they improved visibility into waste across the entire enterprise, extending beyond their cloud footprint.

“By implementing better tagging practices, we can assign unused services to the business while establishing and enforcing policies across all resources for accurate chargebacks and reporting,” said Thomas.

He has found that improving processes to identify waste, such as orphaned resources, rightsizing and reservations, typically uncovers 10-30% overspend, thereby offering quick cost-reduction opportunities.

5. Better ways of working

Thomas noted that a secondary use case that continues to emerge in more mature FinOps deployments is the discovery of more efficient workflows.

“FinOps thrives when finance, engineering and business units collaborate, whereas treating FinOps as an IT-only or finance-only project limits impact,” said Thomas

This requires setting clear goals and accountability, along with defining KPIs like spending reduction targets and unit cost metrics. It’s also important to assign decision rights to mid-level managers to accelerate outcomes.

“Organisations are able to operate more efficiently, observe daily run rates and provide executives with a clear understanding of the unit economics of their cloud spend,” Thomas said.

Source

https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/tip/5-real-world-FinOps-use-cases-to-maximize-ROI

Image Credit

Khunkorn Laowisit via Vecteezy

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]]> 3 FinOps trends to look out for in 2026 https://easysam.co.uk/knowledge-base/3-finops-trends-to-look-out-for-in-2026/ Wed, 11 Mar 2026 09:05:00 +0000 https://easysam.co.uk/?p=37100 As it evolves beyond its traditional focus on cost reduction into a framework for driving business value, discover how FinOps is reshaping tech and finance strategies.

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As it evolves beyond its traditional focus on cost reduction into a framework for driving business value, discover how FinOps is reshaping tech and finance strategies.

Published on 11th March 2026

FinOps bridges the gap between finance, engineering and operations teams to create a culture of accountability, transparency and shared responsibility for cloud costs. However, it has evolved from its traditional cost-reduction roots to providing greater value for all technology investments.

“Value is far more valuable as a metric than cost,” said Tim Crawford, founder and CIO strategic adviser of advisory firm AVOA.

FinOps continues to rise in popularity with 62% of IT leaders who increased their investment in FinOps services and/or platforms over the past 12 months, according to Flexera’s 2026 IT Priorities Report. As it grows, it also evolves.

“FinOps has expanded beyond cloud, or what many teams call ‘Cloud+,’ as organisations try to manage a wider set of technologies across public cloud, private cloud/on-prem and SaaS. Leaders want consistent practices that span the entire technology estate rather than isolated approaches for each environment,” said Jay Litkey, senior vice president of cloud and FinOps at Flexera.

And while it may seem like FinOps should be aligned under the CFO, it is predominantly managed by technology leadership, with 78% of practices reporting into the CTO/CIO organisation, up 18% compared to 2023 data, according to the State of FinOps 2026 Report by the FinOps Foundation. This means that FinOps isn’t just about financial reporting or cost optimisation — FinOps is a technology capability closely tied to architecture, engineering and platform decisions.

See how FinOps is driving value-based decision-making through hybrid and multi-cloud management, AI in FinOps practices and bringing developers into the spending conversation.

A holistic approach to managing hybrid and multi-cloud costs

Organisations increasingly operate in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. These deployment models introduce greater complexity, especially in managing cloud costs. Cloud visibility — the ability for IT teams to comprehensively monitor and analyse an organisation’s entire cloud infrastructure — is a must-have capability.

“FinOps teams are getting better at bringing traditional IT, cloud and asset management disciplines together. As environments grow more complex, organisations need shared visibility and common allocation practices that hold up across the entire stack,” said Litkey.

Organisations will need to rethink their cost management in these types of environments. Crawford calls for a holistic approach to managing value across the cloud providers, not just within each individual provider.

“FinOps provides organisations with a key business ability that has traditionally been missing in cloud environments: comparing multiple cloud and neo-cloud providers to each other in a comprehensive fashion and seeing how various workloads affect pricing in a holistic manner,” said Hyoun Park, vice president of telecom and mobility management at Calero.

It provides a more granular, nuanced way to compare cloud vendors and optimise based on the strengths each provider has across various areas, such as storage, compute, networking and compliance.

“This means that FinOps, which has to this date been very technical in practice, will start having a deeper financial component as FinOps starts being pulled more deeply into budgeting practices, cash flow and treasury planning, and other business planning processes,” said Park.

However, FinOps is moving away from being just a cost-reducing measure and increasingly towards how technology investments are planned, governed and valued, according to the State of FinOps 2026 Report.

“FinOps will be a core cloud operating discipline, not just a cost-optimisation exercise, as AI workloads introduce volatile, usage-based spend,” said Varun Raj, a cloud and AI engineering executive.

AI for FinOps

AI remains a widely adopted technology and can serve as a powerful asset when organisations use it with FinOps. It can also heavily influence cloud buying decisions by providing real-time cost insights and predictive analytics, paired with automated execution to make cost-effective choices.

It can empower line-of-business managers to interrogate cloud environments, invoices, alerts and requests, as well as ask deeper questions about the cloud and other IT costs that keep growing in their profit-and-loss responsibilities, according to Park.

“AI for FinOps is still developing. Today, it primarily helps teams interpret data and surface insights. The real transformation will come when AI can pair those insights with automated execution for rate and workload decisions to happen in real time,” said Litkey.

According to the FinOps Foundation, 49% of respondents said using AI for their FinOps practices is of high importance, with another 32% reporting medium importance.

Common uses for driving such responses include:
  • Anomaly detection and faster alerting
  • Automated right-sizing recommendations
  • Natural language querying of cost data
  • Automated discount instrument procurement
  • Tagging resources to speed up allocation

“Understanding insights as to how to make operational changes, and potentially automate them, across cloud providers addresses the relationship between FinOps, technology business management, cost management and business outcomes. Due to the sheer amount of data and automation required, only AI presents the opportunity to achieve that panacea with speed and accuracy,” said Crawford.

As seen in these uses, automation remains a key part of a FinOps strategy.

“Automation is already reshaping cost management by helping teams act faster and more consistently. There are clear opportunities to automate tasks that do not affect workload performance, which frees up time for teams to focus on high-priority initiatives that require human judgement and decision-making,” said Litkey. “Organisations need automation to make a dent on cloud inefficiencies, which continues to grow with increasing cloud spend.”

The rise of the developer-facing FinOps

When IT people talk about FinOps, developers are not the first people who come to mind. However, they are becoming a more important voice when it comes to spending.

“[An] important trend is the shift toward developer-facing FinOps. More teams are integrating cost accountability into engineering workflows so they can address waste early in the development process,” said Litkey.

52% of engineering leaders say the disconnect between FinOps and developers is leading to wasted spend on cloud infrastructure costs, according to the FinOps in Focus 2025 report by Harness. Additionally, 62% of developers said they want more control over and responsibility for managing cloud costs.

With developer-facing FinOps, developers are made aware of the financial implications of their decisions, such as provisioning cloud resources, scaling applications or choosing specific services. Even more important is access to tools and dashboards to gain more visibility and monitor the costs associated with their workloads in real time.

However, too many tools can do more harm than good as complexity rises — especially in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Litkey is seeing continued momentum in platform consolidation as teams look for fewer tools that can handle visibility and optimisation across rates and workloads.

Source

https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/feature/3-FinOps-trends-to-look-out-for-in-2026

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Toufick Ahamad Shawon via Vecteezy

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]]> When cloud growth outpaces control, waste follows https://easysam.co.uk/knowledge-base/when-cloud-growth-outpaces-control-waste-follows/ Wed, 01 Oct 2025 08:33:46 +0000 https://easysam.co.uk/?p=35941 Developing a mature management of cloud financials, however, can curb that waste and boost operational agility.

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Developing a mature management of cloud financials, however, can curb that waste and boost operational agility.

Published on 1st October 2025

Cloud has become deeply embedded in how modern organisations operate. While the benefits are clear, the economics are becoming harder to navigate.

As businesses scale usage, questions are mounting about whether rising spend is still delivering proportional value. Gartner’s May 2025 trends report predicts that by 2028, one in four organisations will report dissatisfaction with their cloud outcomes.

This discontent reflects a growing distance between infrastructure and accountability, and the growing need for cloud governance to mature, before inefficiencies become embedded.

Designing for visibility, not just reporting

In many organisations, cost is still treated as a reporting outcome rather than something to shape. Spend is reviewed after deployment, leaving optimisation efforts limited to what can be adjusted post-implementation.

Flexera’s 2025 State of the Cloud Report shows that a significant majority of organisations lack detailed visibility into their cloud costs, with only 43% tracking cloud costs at a unit level. This limited visibility hinders most teams’ ability to attribute costs to specific products, services or functions.

Global data also shows that 34% of enterprises are spending more than $1 million monthly on SaaS. As SaaS adoption grows, so does the importance of managing software licensing costs, which can substantially impact cloud expenditures. Consequently, organisations must look for ways to optimise software license costs as they mature their cloud governance practices.

Visibility needs to move earlier in the decision chain, shaping how environments are constructed rather than rationalising them after the fact. A shift left approach brings cost considerations – like infrastructure and software licensing costs – earlier into the product lifecycle, so that organisations can make more informed decisions about their cloud usage. By attributing these costs to specific products or services, organisations can gain a clearer understanding of their overall cloud spend.

By embedding cost insight into the architecture stage, organisations are able to steer usage intentionally. They can optimise cloud spend and build cloud environments that reflect business priorities as well as contribute to more sustainable cloud practices, minimising their environmental footprint.

Bringing cost ownership to where decisions are made

Access to data does not guarantee accountability. Many organisations have detailed cost reporting but continue to struggle with cloud waste.

The issue here shifts from one of visibility towards one of proximity. Data shows 59% of organisations have a FinOps team that does some or all cloud cost optimisation tasks, yet in many cases, these teams still sit at the edge of delivery. So, while they can surface issues, they are often too removed from daily operations to intervene effectively.

The most effective models integrate cost ownership into delivery itself. This means that engineering leads, platform teams and product owners have oversight to take action before inefficiencies take hold.

As a result, when these roles are supported with relevant reporting and shared financial metrics, cost awareness becomes a natural part of the decision-making process. This makes it easier to adjust workloads, retire underutilised services, and optimise environments in-flight, rather than in hindsight.

Organisations with mature FinOps practices are better positioned to manage their cloud costs and reduce waste year over year. This improvement reflects a delivery culture where cost is treated as a design consideration.

Using attribution to prioritise what matters

Many organisations can report how much is being spent and on which services. Far fewer can explain how that spend supports outcomes the business cares about.

87% of organisations view cost efficiency as the primary measure of cloud success, up from 65% last year. This signals a shift in mindset that cloud is no longer assumed to be efficient by default, it must justify its footprint in context.

When cloud spend is tied to individual products, services or customer experiences, the conversation becomes more focused. Governing costs like software licensing ensures that licensing agreements are optimised and aligned with business needs.

Attribution helps shift cloud conversations away from usage and toward value. Taking a holistic approach to cost management not only helps in reducing waste but also contributes to more sustainable cloud practices, ultimately delivering both financial and environmental value.

Early discipline pays off at scale

Control is easiest to build before complexity sets in. The longer organisations delay embedding structure into cloud governance, the harder it becomes to retrofit later. Inconsistent tagging, ambiguous ownership and manual reporting all take time to correct once they are entrenched.

As 33% of global organisations now spend more than 12 million dollars annually on public cloud, this highlights how new services, accounts and tools can be introduced faster than the governance processes required to manage them.

It’s important to note that scaling effectively doesn’t mean avoiding complexity, but there is a need to manage it consistently.

Also, governance does not have to stand in the way of innovation. It can enable it, by improving confidence in decision making, and reducing the uncertainty that often undermines momentum.

Cloud is a system of interdependent decisions, each with its own financial implications. The ability to explain, anticipate and adjust these decisions draws the line between cloud as a delivery of value, or cloud as a cost center. As FinOps matures, designing for cost from the beginning and shifting cost conversations left is key to building cloud environments that scale with control.

Source

https://www.techradar.com/pro/when-cloud-growth-outpaces-control-waste-follows

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Chaowat Rittizin via Vecteezy

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]]> Audit costs, licensing chaos and FinOps: 3 critical calls to action for IT leaders in 2025 https://easysam.co.uk/knowledge-base/audit-costs-licensing-chaos-and-finops-3-critical-calls-to-action-for-it-leaders-in-2025/ Tue, 29 Jul 2025 12:38:20 +0000 https://easysam.co.uk/?p=35632 Turn audit anxiety into a strategic advantage with some of the latest trends and actionable insights - protecting your budget and unlocking IT value.

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Turn audit anxiety into a strategic advantage with some of the latest trends and actionable insights - protecting your budget and unlocking IT value.

Published on 29th July 2025

If you’re an IT leader at a large enterprise, you probably know the feeling: A vendor audit letter lands on your desk, and suddenly your team is scrambling to prove compliance, justify spend and decode the fine print of complex software agreements. The Flexera 2025 State of ITAM Report makes it clear these scenarios aren’t the exception, but the rule. Nearly half of organisations have paid over $1 million in audit fines in the past three years, and the risks are only growing as cloud and SaaS adoption surge.

But there’s good news: Leaders who act now can turn audit anxiety into a strategic advantage. Let’s take a look at some of the latest trends, hidden risks and actionable insights that’ll help you protect your budget and unlock IT value in the year ahead.

Audit fines are draining millions from IT budgets every year

The cost of audits remains high on the priority list for today’s tech leaders. In fact, over the last three years, 45% of companies have paid more than $1 million in audit fines—and Microsoft, IBM and SAP are the companies most often auditing. Audits can reveal significant gaps in understanding how licenses are applied and used. The complexity of software use rights, combined with the rapid shift to cloud services, make it increasingly difficult for IT teams to defend against audits. It’s not just about the financial penalties; it also underscores the need for more robust and integrated IT asset management practices.

The growing complexity of software licensing is yet another struggle—and in just a few years, it’s jumped from sixth place to the top significant challenge plaguing organisations today. The primary culprit? It appears to be an impact from the ongoing migration to cloud environments, which introduces a new layer of intricacy in managing and optimising software assets. Combine this with the limited resources available to software asset management (SAM) teams and you get an environment that makes it hard for good SAM strategies to be put into place. This resource constraint is a double-edged sword because it not only affects how we can manage our current assets but also limits how we can adapt to new and changing cloud technologies.

On a more positive note, there has been a significant increase in collaboration between ITAM and FinOps teams. This collaboration has grown by 6 percentage points year over year worldwide, and even more impressively, by 14 percentage points in Europe. This collaboration is key for managing software in the cloud—and with the focus on cloud license management becoming widespread, it’s a collaboration that will only need to grow. Furthermore, the tracking of SaaS use and the rightsizing of cloud contracts have both seen big increases. Over the past two years, they have improved by 7-8 percentage points. This is good news because it shows that organisations are taking steps to better manage their cloud resources—and it’s important in a time when cloud services are becoming business critical.

Cross-functional collaboration is reshaping ITAM success stories

Collaboration is key, keep it up: Audit defence, licensing management and cost optimisation all require strong partnerships across ITAM, FinOps, security and vendor management teams. Practical steps to promote these efforts include:

  • Establish regular joint reviews between ITAM and FinOps teams to align cloud and SaaS spend. Regular communication helps identify and address issues before they escalate
  • Encourage cross-training and shared KPIs between ITAM and FinOps teams. Shared KPIs align goals and encourage a unified approach to managing software assets and financial resources efficiently
  • Foster strong relationships with vendors to clarify ambiguous licensing terms. Vendors are more likely to provide support and flexibility if you engage in open and regular dialogue about licensing and cost optimisation
  • Collaborate with security teams to maintain compliance and protect assets. Joint efforts can help prevent breaches that lead to costly penalties and audits

Why visibility is your strongest defence

Insight into your entire technology landscape is essential, and this year’s findings show that despite high visibility into on-premises hardware and software, organisations are still struggling with SaaS and cloud visibility especially concerning bring your own licenses (BYOLs). That’s a big red flag considering the surging spend in these areas. Seventy-six percent of respondents in this year’s report reported visibility into on-premises hardware, 75% into software and 63% into cloud instances, but only half feel confident in SaaS visibility and a mere 27% are comfortable with their BYOL positions.

The overall confidence of respondents in their IT visibility also dropped from 47% to 43%, which underscores the increasing complexity and the urgent need for enhanced tools and processes. It’s imperative to bridge this gap to ensure compliance and cost optimisation.

Given these challenges, what steps can you take to stay ahead? These tips are a great place to start:

  • Invest in tools that provide real-time tracking of license usage, application of product use rights and compliance. Detailed usage data and product use rights analysis can make huge differences in how you view license compliance and determine how much you need to renew
  • Define roles and responsibilities for managing new technology domains such as SaaS applications and cloud licenses and AI spend. As organisations invest more in these technologies, leaders will want to understand their return on investment and if these new technologies are secure and used efficiently
  • Maintain up-to-date documentation. You need to ensure teams have a clear understanding of what they’re managing. Keeping up-to-date documentation on policies, roles and responsibilities helps teams make informed decisions—and avoid costly mistakes
  • Integrate ITAM and FinOps processes to achieve end-to-end visibility and control. This ensures that financial and operational data are aligned, enabling better decision-making

Automation is unlocking new levels of efficiency and savings

Manual processes aren’t sufficient to manage the rapid growth of cloud and SaaS environments—and without automation, you risk falling behind and facing compliance issues. Consider these tips as you work toward improving or automating processes within your organisation:

  • Leverage automation to manage and optimise license entitlements, usage and compliance in real time, ensuring that you’re always in control. This reduces the risk of over-provisioning and underutilisation, leading to cost savings
  • Regular internal audits are essential to maintaining compliance. By swiftly identifying discrepancies and areas of non-compliance, you can take immediate action, reducing the risk of penalties and ensuring that your assets are managed effectively
  • Share data and insights across teams to identify savings and reduce shadow IT. This helps in making informed decisions, optimising resources and ensuring that all departments are aligned with your organisation’s financial goals
  • Refine your process along the way. Process improvement and automation aren’t one-time tasks but continuous efforts. This ensures that your teams remain effective and efficient in managing software assets, even as the landscape evolves

The blueprint for resilience in 2025 and beyond

Collaboration, the fundamental need for enhanced visibility into IT assets, the power of automation and real-time tracking tools help address the challenges that IT leaders face. But this is a continuous journey, and IT leaders must commit to ongoing improvement to protect budgets and drive IT value in 2025 and beyond, as the future of IT management depends on it.

Source

https://www.flexera.com/blog/it-asset-management/audit-costs-licensing-chaos-and-finops-3-critical-calls-to-action-for-it-leaders-in-2025/

Image Credit

Ahmed Kabir via Vecteezy

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]]> How to select the right FinOps tool (and why most fall short in 2025) https://easysam.co.uk/knowledge-base/how-to-select-the-right-finops-tool-and-why-most-fall-short-in-2025/ Wed, 16 Jul 2025 09:00:00 +0000 https://easysam.co.uk/?p=35537 As the market for tooling options becomes increasingly saturated, what features matter the most to ensure picking the right one?

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As the market for tooling options becomes increasingly saturated, what features matter the most to ensure picking the right one?

Published on 16th July 2025

There’s a boom echoing through the FinOps tooling market

An explosion of tooling options might seem like a blessing in some markets, and with IT costs growing by the minute, it’s especially critical to pay attention to the boom happening in FinOps. It’s hard to miss that rapid growth; the global cloud FinOps market is expected to expand from $14.93 billion in 2025 to approximately $38.33 billion by 2034, with a projected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 11% indicating steady long-term adoption.

This expansion is driven by the increasing need for cost transparency and financial accountability in cloud environments. With hundreds of tools now claiming to offer “FinOps support,” the true challenge lies in making a smart selection in such a crowded market. If you need proof of just how cramped it is, take a peek at the array of sponsors FinOps X had in 2025—a noticeable increase compared to previous years.

The looming challenge? Too many choices

The FinOps tooling market may be overflowing with platforms that promise cost optimisation, but unfortunately, they don’t all have the same feature set or purposes. Options range from niche resource tuners to broad cloud management suites:

  • Cloud-native tools
  • Point solutions
  • Service providers
  • FinOps platforms
Cloud-native tools work well in instances where you’re on one cloud, but they lack comprehensive visibility, while point solutions handle one or two aspects of FinOps but don’t cover all capabilities. Very few tools offer the deep, end-to-end functionality needed across infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS), container environments, and sustainability goals like a FinOps platform does.

Must-have criteria for selecting a FinOps tool

When selecting a FinOps tool, look for a breadth of key capabilities, including:

  • Data ingestion, including FOCUS support
  • Effective forecasting, planning, and estimating
  • Budgeting per team, application, or program
  • Allocation, invoicing, and chargeback
  • Workload optimisation
  • Rate optimisation
  • Reporting and analytics
  • Anomaly management
  • Policy governance
  • Cloud sustainability
  • Support for intersecting disciplines like IT asset management and licensing

Most solutions excel in one or two of the above capabilities, but few solutions have it all.

Finding the right FinOps tool that plugs into your organisation with adequate functionality goes beyond a feature checklist. You also need to examine solutions for their depth of coverage, scalability, and reliability to ensure that your tool or platform of choice will stand the test of time (and the test of growth).

It’s also mission-critical that your organisation focuses on creating a culture of cost savings through collaboration, education, and enablement so that everyone is taking ownership for cloud costs. Part of that culture shift is operating with FinOps practice operations in mind, such as defining evolving team skills, fostering critical stakeholder relationships, and positioning the FinOps team positively within the organisation.

Ease of use and depth of coverage: the sweet spot

Every new piece of software, application, or project adds to the overload engineering teams face daily. The solutions you put in front of them should be easy to use, reduce operational overhead, and decrease technical debt. When evaluating FinOps tools, consider the importance of user-friendly interfaces and integrations with existing tools so that your engineering teams aren’t slowed down by cost considerations.

Seamless workflows enable you to hit the ground running, and depth of coverage means your teams can access every corner of their IT environment so that they don’t miss opportunities for improvement. With a potential impact on the entire organisation, the ability to more easily manage the cost of your applications through their lifecycle means less headache, less money wasted, and more room for productive innovation.

Taking a holistic approach to FinOps

With FinOps evolving so quickly and new tools emerging on the market, embarking on a holistic approach with a platform that provides depth and flexibility is key. Without solutions that can scale as your organisation grows, and that can keep up with the shifting market, you run the risk of minimising business value and overspending on software.

“FinOps is maturing fast—and companies need tools that keep pace with that evolution. It’s not about tracking costs; it’s about managing change.” — Jay Litkey, Executive Vice President, Cloud Management at Flexera

When evaluating FinOps tools, choose a solution that covers your cloud environment, on-premises environment, and workload migration, all while supporting your organisation in making critical cultural changes with FinOps best practices. Managing the lifecycle of IT assets and licenses is also crucial for a look at total cost of ownership. By selecting a solution that is proven in the market and stays on top of rapid changes with research and consistent innovation, you reduce your risk of falling behind.

Already have a tool in hand? Here’s when to upgrade

If your current tool is falling short in critical areas like cross-cloud visibility, automated governance, or container cost management—or if it doesn’t give visibility into your hybrid infrastructure at all—it may be time to rethink what you have.

A modern FinOps platform that can address challenges around multi-cloud cost allocation, efficient resource usage, and control at scale is essential to align business, engineering, and finance teams. A comprehensive solution gives each of these stakeholders their relevant view of cost, usage, and optimisation opportunities, so IT can adjust resource decisions as business needs shift with changes in the economy and the market.

If you’re new to FinOps tooling, start with the right foundation

Brand new to FinOps tools? You’re not alone in that journey. If you’re just getting started, the temptation is to go with low-cost native tooling or point solutions—but that can lead to siloed data, fragmented workflows, and hidden costs. Instead, look for a comprehensive platform that can grow with your needs and that unites ITAM, SaaS, and FinOps in one interface.

“Enterprises don’t need another tool. They need a partner that understands how to connect cost, usage, and accountability across the organisation.” — Jay Litkey, Executive Vice President, Cloud Management at Flexera

With a FinOps platform that has the full set of features and capabilities, it’s easier to build a culture around cost transparency and financial accountability that all teams follow. Taking a proactive approach to FinOps means businesses can stay ahead of the curve when it comes to mounting cloud costs and optimisation needs.

Source

https://www.flexera.com/blog/finops/how-to-select-the-right-finops-tool-and-why-most-fall-short-in-2025/

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Sirichai Puangsuwan via Vecteezy

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]]> The role of FinOps FOCUS in enhancing cloud cost management and beyond https://easysam.co.uk/knowledge-base/the-role-of-finops-focus-in-enhancing-cloud-cost-management-and-beyond/ Wed, 30 Apr 2025 11:07:57 +0000 https://easysam.co.uk/?p=35057 FOCUS formalises a standard format for cloud bills, with the intent to simplify the complexities involved in data normalisation.

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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.

Source

https://www.flexera.com/blog/finops/the-role-of-finops-focus-in-enhancing-cloud-cost-management-and-beyond/

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Sujin Jetkasettakorn via Vecteezy

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]]> 84 percent of enterprises are struggling to manage cloud spending https://easysam.co.uk/news/84-percent-of-enterprises-are-struggling-to-manage-cloud-spending/ Mon, 24 Mar 2025 10:21:00 +0000 https://easysam.co.uk/?p=34767 That's based on the responses of 750 technical professionals and executives who were surveyed for Flexera's 2025 State of the Cloud Report.

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That's based on the responses of 750 technical professionals and executives who were surveyed for Flexera's 2025 State of the Cloud Report.

Published on 24th March 2025

With cloud spending expected to increase by 28 percent in the coming year, a new poll of over 750 technical professionals and executive leaders worldwide finds that 84 percent see managing cloud spend as their top challenge.

The study from Flexera shows 33 percent of organisations are spending more than $12 million annually on the public cloud alone partly driven by AI adoption. With cloud budgets already exceeding limits by 17 percent, organisations are increasingly turning to managed service providers (60 percent) and expanding use of their FinOps teams to regain control over spending (59 percent).

While estimated wasted cloud spend is falling, the adoption of AI-related public cloud services is rising. In addition to a surge in the use of data warehouse services (76 percent) — often leveraged to feed AI models — generative AI public cloud service use is booming with 72 percent of organisations reportedly using the technology either extensively or sparingly, as compared to 47 percent in 2024.

“AI is in its prime with no indication of losing momentum,” says Jay Litkey, senior vice president of cloud and FinOps at Flexera and governing board member at the FinOps Foundation. “I suspect we’ll see further acceleration of AI use as more organisations embrace their own AI investments and technology vendors introduce agentic AI into their existing toolsets. To stay on budget and accurately forecast for future needs, organisations need to fine-tune how to track and manage their cloud spend and use with FinOps now — or risk a significantly wasted investment.”

Some organisations are moving their workloads back to non-cloud environments (their own datacenters and/or co-located/hosted environments). While this is beginning to happen, only a minority (21 percent) of cloud workloads have currently been repatriated.

Sustainability is a factor too, 57 percent of respondents report they have, or plan to have, a defined sustainability initiative in place within a year, including carbon footprint tracking of cloud use. However, ​saving money is still top of mind given 57 percent saying cost optimisation takes priority over sustainability.

The 2025 State of the Cloud report is available from the Flexera site.

Source

https://betanews.com/2025/03/19/84-percent-of-enterprises-are-struggling-to-manage-cloud-spending/

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Sujin Jetkasettakorn via Vecteezy

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]]> Optimise cloud costs: using automation to avoid waste https://easysam.co.uk/knowledge-base/optimise-cloud-costs-using-automation-to-avoid-waste/ Thu, 27 Feb 2025 11:21:05 +0000 https://easysam.co.uk/?p=34598 There's no need to wait either - there are plenty of opportunities to achieve savings at every level of FinOps maturity.

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There's no need to wait either - there are plenty of opportunities to achieve savings at every level of FinOps maturity.

Published on 27th February 2025

Cloud cost optimization is a primary goal of most FinOps practices. While FinOps teams often start with manual steps to shut down unused or underutilized resources, they quickly discover that waste keeps coming back as developers and IT continue to deploy new cloud resources. It can feel like a never-ending game of whack-a-mole to uncover and eliminate inefficient costs.

Automation is an important tool to prevent and eliminate inefficient use of cloud resources and keep cloud costs from getting out of control. Fortunately, you don’t need to wait until you’ve reached a magical level of FinOps maturity to implement automation. The FinOps Framework highlights automation opportunities at the Crawl, Walk, and Run stages of maturity.

Here are a few detailed recommendations for automating at each stage of your FinOps journey.

Crawl stage

Eliminate unused compute and storage

If you are early in your FinOps journey, you likely have significant spend on compute and storage resources that are no longer used. Often there are compute instances that were spun up for development, testing, or demo purposes, but were never shut down after the development or testing was completed. Another common area for waste is storage buckets that have been provisioned but aren’t being used.

You will want to collaborate with the relevant stakeholders to agree on rules that work for your business. For example, you might agree on a policy with your development teams that instances in development accounts that are unused for the previous 48 hours will be automatically shut down. Alternatively, you could notify the instance owner after 24 hours and then shut it down automatically after 48 hours.

How to automate:

  • Search for unused compute instances in your development, test, or demo environments with no memory or CPU utilization for a specified period of time. You can then alert the owners or optionally shut down the instances.
  • Search for unused storage volumes where no read or write operations have been performed for a period of time or where the storage volume is not attached to any compute resources. You can then alert the owners or optionally take a final snapshot and delete the storage.
  • Search for old snapshots of storage volumes that are older than a specified number of days. You can then alert the owners or optionally delete the snapshots.

Watch for underutilized or expiring commitments

If you’ve begun using Reserved Instances or Savings Plans, make sure you maximize your utilization of these commitments. Low utilization of commitments means that you are wasting money you’ve already paid to the cloud providers. Allowing commitments to expire for even a few days or weeks without replacing them can also cause unexpected spikes in your cloud bill.

How to automate:

  • Monitor utilization of commitments and send alerts if the utilization falls below a certain threshold for a specified period of time.
  • Notify stakeholders in advance of expiring commitments so you can make any necessary adjustments
  • Use tools that can help automatically optimize and manage commitments for you.

Get alerts when cloud spend will exceed budgets

Even in the early stages of your FinOps journey, you can use budget alerts to notify you if you are forecasted to exceed your budgeted cloud spend in any given month. By getting alerted, you can identify any unexpected costs and take action to bring your spend back in line with your budgets.

Even in the early stages of your FinOps journey, you can use budget alerts to notify you if you are forecasted to exceed your budgeted cloud spend in any given month. By getting alerted, you can identify any unexpected costs and take action to bring your spend back in line with your budgets.

How to automate:

  • Use automated tools to track forecasted monthly spend vs. budget and send alerts to stakeholders. You may choose to set up these alerts for any cloud vendor, department, cloud account, or cloud service.

Walk stage

Apply schedules for intermittently used compute instances

Many organizations have applications that don’t need to be running 24×7. The most common example of this is development instances which are not needed when developers aren’t working. However, you may have other applications that are only needed during business hours and can be shut down after hours or on weekends. Keep in mind that running an application 12×5 (12 hours a day for 5 days a week) can save 65% versus the cost of running 24×7.

How to automate:

  • Automatically shut down development instances after hours or on weekends. Restart the instances before your developers come back to work each day. Use tags to indicate which instances can be shut down and the schedule to be followed.
  • Automatically shut down unneeded instances after hours or on weekends. Restart the instances before your work hours each day. Use tags to indicate which instances can be shut down and the schedule to be followed.

Use Bring-Your-Own-License (BYOL) to reduce software costs

Cloud providers offer the option to include commercial software like Windows Server, RedHat Enterprise Linux, SQL Server, and Oracle Database as part of your cloud services. The cost of these software packages is also much higher than the costs of the underlying cloud infrastructure and can represent a significant portion of your cloud bill.

By default, you will be billed directly by the cloud provider for these software licenses on an hourly basis using “pay-as-you-go” (PAYG) prices. Unfortunately, for instances that are running 24×7, these PAYG prices can be 6 times more than your negotiated discounts from the software vendors.

Alternatively, you can change to a bring your own license option (BYOL) and use licenses that you have already purchased from the software vendor, which can represent as much as 85% savings. However, developers and IT staff often don’t know when to choose BYOL and instead leave the PAYG default resulting in higher costs.

How to automate:

  • Continuously look for instances using PAYG where money could be saved using BYOL. Alert your software asset management team and optionally apply the BYOL flag to the instance.

Run stage

Rightsize cloud resources

As more and more workloads are deployed in the cloud, it is very common to find that you are paying for larger instance sizes or higher resource tiers than are needed. This results in wasted spend that could be recaptured by rightsizing.

You will want to gather information about overprovisioned resources and collaborate closely with your DevOps teams to determine where rightsizing is feasible

How to automate:

  • Use automated checks to identify compute or database instances that are under utilization thresholds over a specified period of time. Send alerts or create tickets to evaluate for rightsizing.

Automate commitment management

As you progress in your FinOps maturity, you will make extensive use of Savings Plans and other commitments like Reserved Instances or Committed Use Discounts. Managing and optimizing these commitments and ensuring they are full utilized becomes more and more complex for large environments.

Automated tools can continuously analyze your environment, make recommendations, and even take automated actions to buy, convert, and sell commitments.

How to automate:

  • Use automated tools that continuously analyze your environment, make recommendations, and even take automated actions to buy, convert, and sell commitments within guardrails that you specify.

Optimize container environments

With the rapid adoption of Kubernetes, optimizing these environments can result in significant savings and better performance. FinOps and DevOps teams must work together to evaluate how automated tools can help you optimize Kubernetes clusters and choose the best purchase options, including on-demand, spot instances, commitments and savings plans.

How to automate:

  • Automated tools can help you continuously analyze workloads to rightsize Kubernetes clusters, avoiding both under- and over-provisioning.
  • Automated tools can identify the best instance purchase options for Kubernetes and maximize the use of commitments.

Source

https://www.flexera.com/blog/finops/optimize-cloud-costs-using-automation-to-avoid-waste/

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Aitthiphong Khongthong via Vecteezy

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]]> FinOps And SaaS management: collaboration is the key to optimisation https://easysam.co.uk/knowledge-base/finops-and-saas-management-collaboration-is-the-key-to-optimisation/ Wed, 12 Feb 2025 14:05:22 +0000 https://easysam.co.uk/?p=34411 Cross-organisational initiatives can bring together the data that’s needed to derive the best value possible from technology investments.

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Cross-organisational initiatives can bring together the data that’s needed to derive the best value possible from technology investments.

Published on 12th February 2025

Today, with multiple ways for technology to get into your organization—from an employee paying for a single software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscription on their own credit card to massive numbers of assets and contracts with thousands of technology suppliers being assumed through a merger or acquisition—the problem of managing IT resources and expenses is growing exponentially.

The visibility gap and management challenges are more daunting as organizations aim to maximize the value of their rapidly growing investments in artificial intelligence (AI). However, technology can’t control costs by itself; a sound organizational approach is key.

Organizational structure is a huge variable when it comes to how well IT initiatives and spending are managed. It isn’t uncommon for different organizations to have different approaches. For example, a cloud-focused FinOps team might oversee IT asset management (ITAM) initiatives. Or conversely, ITAM might manage FinOps. SaaS management and security could be involved in these initiatives as well.

Consider these best practices in order to surface data that applies to a variety of functional areas, particularly FinOps and SaaS management.

The FinOps Approach: Expanding To SaaS And The Data Center

FinOps, defined by the FinOps Foundation as “an operational framework and cultural practice which maximizes the business value of cloud, enables timely data-driven decision-making, and creates financial accountability through collaboration between engineering, finance, and business teams,” was traditionally focused on cloud financial management. It’s an essential approach to controlling licenses in the cloud and cloud expenses.

Over the past two years, as FinOps practices matured and cloud dominance became clearer, the processes and principles of FinOps have been integrated with other areas. The FinOps Foundation says that the practice of FinOps is expanding beyond the public cloud by adding data centers and SaaS as core areas, called FinOps Scopes, that need to be considered to manage costs effectively.

The FinOps SaaS Scope provides a framework that can be applied iteratively at scale to evaluate things like decentralized procurement processes, the resulting organizational visibility and pricing models. The result for SaaS optimization is transparency and accountability in SaaS spending, which is evaluated by more traditional approaches to FinOps.

The Spread Of SaaS

SaaS can fall into several categories. For example, traditional software includes human resources (HR) and productivity applications, such as those from Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, Microsoft Office 365 and SAP. Another category includes databases and data platforms available on cloud marketplaces such as Databricks, MongoDB and Snowflake.

SaaS is increasingly common and increasingly difficult to manage. This issue is growing exponentially as adoption of AI and generative AI (GenAI) technologies are being adopted as SaaS. This is particularly noteworthy as OpenAI, supplier of ChatGPT, made the list of top five technology vendors that IT leaders currently or plan to spend the most within 2025.

The growing need to manage SaaS is reflected in current trends:

  • Sixty-eight percent of IT decision-makers say that their business units are procuring far more cloud and SaaS than IT knows about.
  • Sixty-four percent say that SaaS is a key area of increased investment.
  • Twenty-six percent think they are overspending on SaaS applications.
Taken together, these depict business scenarios where spend on SaaS is increasing, and overspending is potentially problematic. SaaS also plays a significant role in the growth (and therefore the financial and security risks) of shadow IT.

How To Overcome Hurdles That Impede FinOps

Fortunately, cross-organizational initiatives can bring together the underlying data that’s required to manage expenses and derive the best value possible from technology investments. Data—normalized and enriched to create a single system of insight—is the foundation on which collaborative efforts can be built and refined.

Whether your chief financial officer (CFO), chief procurement officer (CPO), chief information officer (CIO) or someone else is leading the charge for spend optimization, collaborative improvements are essential for improving your FinOps and SaaS management initiatives.

Source

https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2025/01/03/finops-and-saas-management-collaboration-is-the-key-to-optimization/

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Imam Fathoni via Vecteezy

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