FinOps in 5 minutes

Our Business Guide to cloud FinOps:
Smarter Cloud Spend Starts Here

What is Cloud FinOps?

Cloud cost optimisation meets financial accountability.

Cloud FinOps, short for Cloud Financial Operations, is a discipline that helps businesses manage and reduce their cloud spend. It brings together IT, finance, and operations teams to make informed decisions about cloud usage, pricing models, and budgeting.

Think of it as the CFO and DevOps finally shaking hands. Instead of engineering teams deploying resources without cost visibility, FinOps ensures every gigabyte, compute hour, and SKU is tracked, tagged, and reported against the business outcome it’s meant to drive.

It’s not just a toolset; it’s a mindset. The FinOps Foundation defines it as a “discipline and cultural practice” that enables real-time visibility, collaboration, and accountability for cloud usage and spend.

It applies across all major platforms: Azure, AWS, and GCP. Its core principles are:

  • Teams need to collaborate;

  • Cloud users must take ownership of usage;

  • A central team drives FinOps best practices.

FinOps aligns closely with cloud financial management and cloud cost governance. It supports both single-cloud and multi-cloud optimisation strategies, allowing organisations to take control no matter how complex their infrastructure.

Ultimately, FinOps isn’t about spending less; it’s about spending smarter. Every pound saved in the cloud is a pound freed for innovation elsewhere.

Five Big Benefits of FinOps

Why cloud-smart companies are embracing it fast.

FinOps isn’t a buzzword; it’s a measurable advantage. When done well, FinOps delivers real savings, clearer visibility, and tighter alignment between engineering and finance. It’s a foundational part of cloud financial management and multi-cloud optimisation strategies. Here are five of the biggest benefits:

1. Cost Savings (20–40%)

Most businesses overspend by default. Right-sizing resources, removing waste, and renegotiating contracts can typically reduce cloud bills by 20 to 40 percent. That’s £60k or more per year for a business spending £20k/month on Azure or AWS.

2. Accurate Forecasting

With FinOps, spend isn't a surprise. Teams gain real-time data to model future costs, set budget thresholds, and avoid end-of-month shocks. Predictable spending supports more reliable financial planning.

3. Accountability Across Teams

FinOps breaks silos. Engineering, finance, and leadership all speak the same language: cost per environment, per team, per project. Everyone knows who’s spending what, and why. This accountability supports stronger internal governance.

4. Speed Without Waste

Dev teams can still move fast, but with smarter defaults. Auto-scaling, tagging, and approved resource types help control spend without slowing innovation or agility.

5. Negotiation Power

When you know your numbers, vendors can’t bluff. FinOps gives you the data to negotiate reserved instances, licensing tiers, and long-term commitments with confidence. It becomes a core pillar of cloud cost governance.

Cross-Departmental Billing,
Tagging & Labelling

The backbone of visibility and accountability.

Cloud bills are noisy. Without structure, it’s impossible to know who’s spending what. That’s why tagging and labelling your cloud resources is one of the highest-impact steps in FinOps and a cornerstone of effective cloud financial management.

Every resource—whether it’s a VM, disk, database, or container—should be tagged with:

  • Owner (e.g. owner=marketing.team@company.com);

  • Environment (e.g. env=prod, env=dev);

  • Cost centre or project (e.g. cost-centre=SalesOps).

When done consistently, tagging lets you break down cloud spend by department, team, project, or product. This enables chargeback (billing teams for what they use) or showback (displaying usage for awareness and accountability).

For example:
If the monthly cloud bill is £100,000, but £35,000 is tagged to dev/test environments, the business now knows where optimisations should start.

Unlabelled spend is invisible spend. FinOps makes it visible, fair, and manageable; especially in multi-cloud environments where governance complexity increases.

Right-Sizing & Hunting Orphan Disks

Cut waste without cutting performance.

Most cloud environments are bloated. Overprovisioned resources and forgotten storage can quietly rack up thousands in unnecessary spend. Two of the fastest ways to reduce costs in any cloud financial management strategy are right-sizing and removing orphaned assets.

Right-Sizing

Right-sizing means adjusting cloud resources to match actual usage:

  • Scale VMs down to smaller SKUs;

  • Use autoscaling for variable workloads;

  • Reduce database compute tiers or storage if underutilised.

Example:
A business running a D8s VM (8 vCPU) with CPU usage averaging 10% could downsize to a D2s. That instantly cuts the instance’s cost by 75%, with no impact on performance.

Orphan Disks

Orphaned resources are cloud assets that aren’t attached to anything—but you’re still paying for them:

  • Detached managed disks;

  • Unused public IPs;

  • Idle load balancers;

  • Forgotten snapshots.

These often linger after test environments or old deployments are deleted. A simple script or third-party tool can uncover these in minutes. In many FinOps and cloud cost governance projects, the first 10 to 15 percent of savings come from these low-hanging fruit before any negotiation or structural change is needed.

Dashboards vs Consultants:
Why People Matter

You can’t automate negotiation.

Cloud cost dashboards are everywhere: AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management, GCP Billing Reports. They show what you’re spending and where. But they don’t tell you why it’s happening, or how to fix it.

That’s where consultants come in.

A good FinOps consultant isn’t just a data interpreter. They’re a strategic advisor; someone who understands cloud architecture, licensing quirks, vendor behaviour, and internal politics. They can:

  • Uncover licensing inefficiencies (e.g. misuse of hybrid benefits or lack of reserved instances);

  • Spot supplier-side incentives that may misalign with your goals;

  • Guide cloud teams in game-playing decisions that reduce long-term cost without compromising agility.

Why not rely on your CSP?

Your Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) wants you to spend more. A consultant isn’t trying to upsell services; they’re incentivised to cut waste. They work with your teams, not against them, to drive genuine savings.

Dashboards are the cockpit.
Consultants are the pilot.

In a multi-cloud strategy, where billing complexity multiplies, human expertise makes the difference between surface-level reporting and real cloud cost control.

How Much Can the Average Business Save?

The numbers behind the promise.

Across Azure, AWS, and GCP, most businesses are overspending by 20 to 40 percent. Not due to recklessness, but because cloud is complex, billing is opaque, and optimisation rarely gets prioritised.

Here’s what savings typically look like:

  • Baseline: Businesses spending £20,000/month on cloud;

  • Typical FinOps outcome: 25 to 30 percent reduction in under 6 months;

  • Annual savings: £60,000–£72,000.

This isn’t theoretical. According to Deloitte, enterprises with mature cloud financial operations save even more—up to 40 percent on annual cloud costs. McKinsey calls cloud spend “the largest unmanaged cost line item” in many tech budgets.

When you apply consistent tagging, right-sizing, accountability, and strategic negotiation, the numbers add up fast. In a multi-cloud environment, unmanaged spend compounds quickly; especially across dev/test environments, legacy services, or auto-provisioned workloads with no oversight.

Bottom line:
If you’re not actively managing cloud costs, you’re probably burning tens of thousands.

Next step: Curious what your potential savings look like? Start with a cost visibility audit or speak to a FinOps expert. A short review could uncover five or six figures in waste—often within days.

Ready to Get Started?

FinOps isn’t just a trend—it’s a competitive advantage. The sooner you start, the faster you unlock savings, build accountability, and free up resources for innovation.

Reach out to one of Brunel Cloud’s account team for an initial consultation.
We’ll help you assess your current cloud spend, identify quick wins, and lay the foundations for long-term optimisation.