FinOps and Cloud Cost Optimisation
Take control of you cloud spend
Cloud gives you speed, scale and flexibility. It doesn’t automatically give you control over what you’re spending.
As cloud consumption grows across teams, applications, projects and environments, so does your cloud spend. Without the right visibility and controls, costs can grow faster than anyone can explain, and long before they’re reflected in a meaningful business plan.
FinOps brings finance, technology and the business together to take control of cloud costs. It provides a shared view of cloud spend, helps identify opportunities to optimise workloads and gives teams the insight they need to make better decisions about where and how they use cloud.
At DeeperThanBlue, we help organisations turn cloud cost management from a reactive exercise into an ongoing discipline that supports both financial control and business growth.
What is FinOps?
FinOps, short for cloud financial operations, is an operating discipline for managing and optimising cloud costs.
It brings together finance, engineering, IT and business teams around a shared understanding of cloud consumption and its value. Rather than treating cloud as simply another line on the technology budget, FinOps helps organisations understand what they’re spending, why they’re spending it and whether that spend is delivering the expected value.
FinOps isn’t about cutting cloud costs at any price. It’s about getting the right value from every pound of cloud investment.
A successful FinOps approach typically centres on three continuous activities:
Inform
Create accurate, accessible visibility of cloud costs and consumption. Understand spend by cloud service, workload, team, application, project or business unit, rather than relying on a single monthly invoice.
Optimise
Identify and act on opportunities to reduce unnecessary cloud spend. This can include rightsizing workloads, removing unused resources, optimising storage, improving utilisation and making better use of commitment-based pricing.
Operate
Make cloud cost management part of normal operational decision-making. Establish ownership, governance and regular reviews so that optimisation doesn’t become a one-off cost-cutting exercise.
Why cloud costs get out of control
Most organisations don’t overspend on cloud because of one catastrophic decision. Cloud costs usually increase through dozens of smaller decisions that accumulate over time.
Common problems include:
- Limited visibility: cloud spend is distributed across subscriptions, accounts, services and projects, making it difficult to establish a clear picture of total cost.
- Unclear ownership: engineering teams can provision cloud resources quickly, but responsibility for ongoing costs isn’t always clear.
- Unused resources: idle compute, orphaned storage, unused databases and other resources can continue generating costs long after they’re needed.
- Over-provisioned workloads: resources are sometimes sized for peak demand but operate well below that level for much of the time.
- Inefficient storage: data may remain on more expensive storage tiers when lower-cost alternatives would meet requirements.
- Missed commitment opportunities: reserved capacity, savings plans and committed use discounts can reduce costs, but only when they’re aligned with genuine usage patterns.
- Poor forecasting: without reliable consumption data and a repeatable process, cloud budgets can become little more than educated guesses.
The result is often the same: increasing cloud spend, limited visibility of where the money is going, and uncertainty about whether cloud investment is delivering sufficient value.
How much could you save?
A structured FinOps programme typically delivers 20–40% cloud spend savings across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, with top‑quartile organisations achieving 35–45%+ effective discount rates. Benchmarks show most enterprises start with 12–15% savings in the first six months, rising to 25–30% after ~18 months as practices embed, even while workload volumes grow. The biggest levers are commitment-based pricing (up to 66–72% vs on‑demand), rightsizing and idle elimination (~28% median waste), Kubernetes/container optimisation (median 34% reduction), and non‑prod scheduling (65–70% cut for dev/test).
For a simple ROI model, assume a £1m annual cloud bill: a conservative 20% saving yields £200k/year; a mature 30% programme yields £300k/year; and a top‑quartile 40% outcome yields £400k/year. If implementation costs (tooling, advisory, internal effort) total £100k in year one, payback is under six months at 20% savings and under three months at 40%, with recurring net benefits of £100k–£300k+ per year thereafter. This aligns with industry data showing 10–20% additional untapped savings after baseline optimisation, making FinOps a high‑ROI, low‑risk investment for cloud-heavy organisations.
Reference: McKinsey Report: Everything is better as code: Using FinOps to manage cloud costs
Cloud cost management that supports the business
Effective cloud cost management is about more than finding things you can switch off.
It requires an understanding of how cloud resources are being used, who is using them, what they support and what the business actually needs from them.
Our approach combines cost visibility, optimisation and governance to help you make informed decisions about your cloud estate.
We can help with:
Cloud cost visibility and baselining
Establish a clear picture of your current cloud spend across your environment.
We consolidate and analyse cloud cost data, improve tagging and allocation, and help establish a shared source of truth for finance, technology and business teams.
Cloud optimisation reviews
Identify where cloud costs can be reduced without compromising application performance, resilience or business requirements.
We look for opportunities including rightsizing, unused and orphaned resources, workload optimisation, storage optimisation and inefficient consumption patterns.
FinOps consulting
If you’re introducing FinOps or looking to mature an existing approach, we can help establish the processes, responsibilities and governance needed to make it effective.
Our FinOps consulting approach can support organisations from an initial assessment of cloud spend through to the development of a mature, ongoing FinOps capability.
Commitment and pricing strategy
Cloud providers offer a range of pricing models designed to reduce the cost of predictable consumption.
We can help you understand where reserved capacity, savings plans and committed use discounts make commercial sense, based on actual usage rather than assumptions.
Governance and tagging
Good cost management depends on being able to attribute spend accurately.
We can help establish appropriate tagging, allocation and governance frameworks so that cloud costs can be associated with the teams, applications and projects responsible for them.
Ongoing FinOps services
Cloud environments change constantly. New workloads are deployed, usage patterns change and previously optimised resources can become inefficient again.
Our FinOps services can provide an ongoing cadence of cost reviews, forecasting, optimisation and remediation, helping organisations maintain control of cloud spend over the long term.
FinOps meets Kubernetes: optimise the platform, not just the bill
Containerisation and Kubernetes can make cloud infrastructure more efficient by allowing workloads to share resources and scale dynamically. But that flexibility can also make cloud costs more difficult to track and manage.
Kubernetes introduces another layer between cloud infrastructure and the applications consuming it. Without appropriate resource requests, limits, workload scheduling and cost allocation, organisations can end up paying for capacity that isn’t being fully utilised, while having limited visibility of which applications or teams are driving that spend.
FinOps and Kubernetes work particularly well together when cost becomes part of the platform engineering conversation.
We can help you identify opportunities to optimise Kubernetes environments through:
- Resource optimisation: reviewing CPU and memory requests and limits to reduce over-provisioning and improve utilisation.
- Workload efficiency: understanding how applications consume resources and identifying opportunities to improve their efficiency.
- Cluster utilisation: making better use of available compute capacity rather than continually adding infrastructure to accommodate peaks.
- Cost allocation: improving visibility of cloud costs across clusters, namespaces, applications, teams and workloads.
- Scaling strategies: aligning autoscaling and infrastructure capacity with actual demand, rather than simply scaling upwards.
- Ongoing governance: bringing cost considerations into platform engineering and operational decisions alongside performance, resilience and security.
The result is a Kubernetes environment that isn’t just technically efficient, but financially accountable too.
Better cloud economics starts with understanding what you’re running, how it’s consuming resources and what value it delivers.
FinOps across your cloud environment
Your approach to FinOps will depend on the cloud platforms, workloads and operating model within your organisation.
Whether you’re running a single-cloud environment or a complex hybrid or multi-cloud estate, we can help you establish better visibility and control of your cloud costs.
Our experience includes Azure FinOps, AWS FinOps, Google FinOps and cloud cost management across complex environments.
Explore our approach to cloud cost optimisation across:
Microsoft Azure
Understand, manage and optimise your Azure cloud spend with better visibility, governance and workload optimisation.
Google Cloud
Take a structured approach to managing Google Cloud costs and aligning consumption with business requirements.
Amazon Web Services
Improve visibility of AWS consumption and identify opportunities to optimise workloads and reduce unnecessary cloud costs.
FinOps solutions built around your organisation
There is no single FinOps tool or process that works for every organisation.
The right approach depends on your cloud architecture, workloads, governance model, organisational structure and business priorities.
That’s why we focus on the underlying outcomes: better visibility, better decisions and better value from cloud investment.
Whether you need help understanding why your cloud bill has increased, want to establish a formal FinOps capability or need ongoing support to manage a complex cloud estate, we can help.
Take control of your cloud spend
Cloud should enable your business, not leave you wondering where the budget went.
Our FinOps and cloud cost management services help you understand your consumption, identify opportunities to optimise and establish the processes needed to keep cloud spend under control.
Talk to us about your cloud costs and we’ll start with a straightforward review of where your money is going and where there may be opportunities to improve.
+44 (0)114 399 2820
info@deeperthanblue.com
Get in touch
FinOps and FinOps Services FAQs
1. What is FinOps? +
2. How can FinOps reduce cloud costs? +
3. What is cloud cost management? +
4. What does a FinOps consultant do? +
5. Who is responsible for FinOps? +
6. What are the three phases of FinOps? +
7. Does FinOps only apply to large organisations? +
8. Can FinOps help with multi-cloud costs? +
9. Can FinOps be provided as an ongoing service? +
