FinOps and Cloud Spend Management are in the spotlight as the cloud becomes essential to modern business. The flexibility and scalability afforded by cloud computing have brought significant benefits, but also significant cost control challenges. Without clear governance, spending can quickly spiral out of control. In this article, we’ll show you how these practices connect with the IT Asset Management (ITAM), why they are crucial to the financial health of the cloud and how to apply them to avoid waste and maximize the value of investments.
What is FINOps?
FINOps is short for Financial Operations — a collaborative practice between finance, technology and operations, focused on cloud financial management. The goal is to ensure that every decision about cloud resource usage is data-driven and aligned with business objectives.
Main pillars of FINOps:
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Collaboration between areas (IT, finance, engineering, product);
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Real-time visibility into cloud costs;
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Continuous optimization of resources used;
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Decentralized accountability for spending.
Best practices for optimizing cloud costs with FINOps
Implementing FINOps effectively goes beyond the use of tools: it requires a cultural shift in how an organization approaches cloud costs. Continuous usage and cost analysis is essential to success, constantly monitoring resource consumption and associated expenses. Automation also plays an important role, especially in the shutdown of idle resources, which helps reduce waste and avoid unnecessary charges. Another best practice is to take advantage of volume discounts or reserved instances, which are ideal for predictable workloads.
Additionally, it is essential to educate engineering, finance, and business teams on cloud financial practices, fostering a culture of shared responsibility. Finally, using spend alerts and budget limits customized by project or team allows for quick responses to deviations and improves overall financial control of the cloud environment.
Benefits of adopting FINOps
Adopting FinOps is a strategic step for companies that want to evolve in cloud governance maturity, bringing a series of concrete and measurable benefits. Among the main gains is real-time cloud financial management, with updated insights that allow for quick and informed decisions. The practice also significantly improves the accuracy of cloud billing and cost allocation by project, ensuring that each business unit understands and manages its own expenses.
Another strength of FinOps is the alignment between engineering, finance, and business teams, fostering a collaborative and results-oriented culture. Detailed visibility into cloud spend enables opportunities for optimization, while business value-driven strategies help direct investments to where they truly generate impact. Based on FinOps Foundation best practices, FinOps teams now have tools and processes that enable them to continuously monitor and adjust cloud resource usage, keeping costs under control and encouraging decentralized accountability, where each team is jointly responsible for efficient cloud use.
How FINOps Connects Finance, Engineering, and Business to Optimize Cloud Costs
FINOps goes far beyond simple cloud financial management. It creates a bridge between engineering, finance, and business teams, promoting financial accountability and operational efficiency in the use of cloud resources.
As companies accelerate their journey to the cloud, new challenges arise in cloud cost management and financial management, requiring a strategic approach to reducing costs, improving business agility and ensuring return on cloud investments.
Cloud cost optimization is one of the pillars of the FINOps framework, allowing companies to identify and eliminate unnecessary expenses, optimize resource consumption and align the use of cloud infrastructure with business goals.
What is Cloud Spend Management?
Cloud Spend Management is the set of practices, tools and policies that aim to monitor, control and optimize spending on cloud services (cloud investments). It is a key component of FINOps, which acts in a more technical and operational way to control the use of cloud resources.
Without this management, it is easy to lose control — after all, in the cloud, resources are consumed on demand, often by different areas of the company, which can generate: unnecessary expenses, improper use of services, lack of visibility by department or project and even financial surprises at the end of the month.
Why is Cloud Spend Management important?
The cloud offers many benefits, but it also carries financial risks if used poorly. Cloud spending management is crucial to avoid:
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Uncontrolled cost growth;
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Waste of resources due to poor configuration;
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Lack of accountability on the part of the teams;
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Compliance or security failures.
What is the relationship between FINOps, Cloud Spend Management and ITAM?
ITAM (IT Asset Management) has always had the mission of monitoring and controlling physical and digital assets. With digital transformation and migration to the cloud, this scope has expanded.
Now, cloud assets—such as instances, SaaS licenses, multicloud environments, and containers—are also IT assets and need to be treated as such.
How does ITAM expand to include Cloud Spend Management and FINOps?
ITAM evolves by incorporating cloud cost management as part of asset management. This involves:
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Continuous monitoring of cloud resource consumption;
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Optimization of allocation and use of contracted resources;
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Analysis of the total cost of ownership (TCO) of cloud assets;
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Unified governance for physical, digital and cloud assets.
This expansion enables ITAM to provide valuable insights to FINOps, driving strategic decisions based on real consumption and cost data.
What are the benefits of Cloud Spend Management in the context of ITAM?
By integrating Cloud Spend Management into your ITAM strategy, your company reaps benefits such as:
1. Multicloud cost control
Monitor resources and spending across different providers (AWS, azure, GCP) in a single panel, ensuring centralization and standardization.
2. Identification of waste
Detect idle, underutilized or duplicated resources, promoting an efficient and responsible use policy.
3. Smart allocation by projects or departments
Implement chargeback or showback accurately, increasing transparency and avoiding internal conflicts over budgets.
4. Prevention of unauthorized expenditure
With well-defined rules, policies and automations, reduce the risk of shadow IT and improper hiring.
How can I start incorporating Cloud Spend Management and FINOps into my ITAM strategy?
Integrating these practices requires a structured approach. In this session, we will cover five practical steps. Here’s where to start:
1. Assess your current cloud spending
Make a complete survey of the resources in use, contracted providers, consumption volumes and those responsible for these expenses.
2. Define clear usage and acquisition policies
Establish guidelines for provisioning, shutting down, monitoring, and scaling resources.
3. Implement cost allocation structures
Use tags, segregated accounts or cost centers to accurately identify those responsible for consumption.
4. Choose suitable tools
Adopt platforms that offer visibility, control and automation, such as ServiceNow, with integration between ITAM and Cloud Management.
5. Promote collaboration between areas
Engage IT, finance, and engineering so everyone works together in the data-driven decision-making process.
Integration with tools and platforms
Tools like Google Cloud, Google Workspace, and platforms like ServiceNow offer robust functionality for managing cloud costs, controlling data transfer, and tracking cloud usage by business unit, team, or service.
These capabilities help strengthen governance over cloud spending and enable proactive actions to optimize costs, while ensuring cloud security and supporting innovation with control.
Adopting a FINOps and Cloud Spend Management approach is not just about cost savings. It’s about ensuring that the cloud is used strategically, responsibly, and in alignment with business objectives.
With the help of modern ITAM, your company can: ggain control over assets and expenses, thecontinually optimize the use of resources, andavoid financial surprises and ensure compliance,accelerate data-driven decision making.
Ready to transform your cost management in the cloud? Talk to an expert from 4MATT and discover how we can support your journey towards efficiency and complete governance in the cloud era.