FinOps has become the new superpower for CFOs

Most CFOs can tell you how much they spend on people, rent, or R&D. Ask them about their cloud bills, and the answer often begins with a long pause.

The elasticity that makes the cloud so powerful also makes its costs unpredictable. This means finance teams have to keep track of expenses that constantly fluctuate.

“FinOps works because it connects two worlds that haven't always understood each other. It turns complexity into something people can actually act on.”

Eric Pinet,
Unicorn

An AI chatbot whose price jumped from $4,000 to $47,000 in three months. A development team that “saves” $200 on the database, but adds $900 in Lambda costs. Infrastructure audit reveals 847 orphaned Elastic Block Store volumes, quietly draining $2,100 per month.

According to Eric Pinet, President UnicornCloud spending doesn't increase overnight. They leak.

“A few additional test environments, new analytics features, or an uncontrolled storage policy could double the bill before anyone notices,” Pinet said.

Continuous cost leakage has pushed more companies to adopt FinOps, a discipline built on making cloud costs understandable. This practice brings together finance and engineering teams to track, forecast and continually control an organization's cloud spending.

“FinOps works because it connects two worlds that don’t always understand each other,” Pinet added. “It turns complexity into something that people can actually act on.”

How costs get complicated

The cloud is built for speed. This allows teams to deploy new services globally in minutes, automatically scale during peak demand, and continually experiment to improve their products and systems.

Here's why so many organizations rely on platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS) to run mission-critical systems, and why almost half All organizations have moved at least half of their applications to public clouds.

But every level of convenience in the cloud also adds a layer of complexity. Only AWS releases new updates dailyand each has potential financial implications that even experienced teams have difficulty tracking.

A new feature may seem minor, such as a different storage class, tuning the database engine, or changing automatic logging. But these small changes could change how workloads are billed.

Cloud systems also rely on a network of connected services, and when one of them changes, others often follow. An adjustment to save money in one area may increase costs in another. And while tools like AWS Cost Explorer show the total costs for each service, they don't show the root cause of the change.

“You can’t manage what you can’t see,” Pinet said. “For example, a customer with $12,000 in monthly relational database maintenance costs from AWS may only see a summary, with no insight into how they can optimize.”

The growing AI workload has also meant that ever-changing costs have become a bigger concern in boardrooms. “AI workloads scale very quickly,” Pinet added. “Without cost transparency, you won't be able to tell if you're actually creating value or just burning money.”

Application of FinOps in practice

When FinOps works, teams know what they are spending and why. In real time, finance teams can see how costs are changing as new features are introduced, and engineers can identify which services are growing faster than expected. Dashboards turn those numbers into something both parties can use, and alerts catch violations before they become problems.

Usually the process starts small. Early efforts focus on the basics, such as cleaning up unused resources, setting rules for backup and storage, and reserving capacity for always-on services. Pinay called these moves “low-hanging fruit” and quick wins that quickly save money and build trust.

Once the basics are in place, the work of FinOps goes deeper. Teams are starting to properly size their servers and memory to avoid waste, which can ultimately reduce waste and lead to longer-term savings.

Later, the focus shifts to the architecture itself, which means looking at how data is structured and how pay-as-you-go services are used alongside dedicated infrastructure to control scaling costs.

It is at this point that Pinet says FinOps should become a common habit throughout the organization. He said teams must implement the right systems for a “culture of shared responsibility,” such as automated policies, approval workflows and ongoing training.

“FinOps only succeeds when it is part of everyday work,” he added. “It should be woven into the team’s daily routine, just like code reviews or security reviews.”

Pay

According to Pinet, organizations that master FinOps and use systematic analysis and implementation can reduce their cloud costs by more than 30 percent.

But achieving FinOps maturity depends on understanding what drives spending, not just what the total amounts are. This is the goal StableUnicorne's AWS cost optimization platform. Stable connects directly to a company's cloud environment and transforms usage data into actionable insights that teams can act on.

Users describe Stable's impact as immediate. Damien Demessens, CTO of Montreal-based marketing firm 4th Whale, said Stable has “played an important role in helping us consistently save on our AWS bills,” adding that the platform has helped his team cut cloud costs by 56 percent.

Alexander Walsh, co-founder and vice president of engineering at Quebec-based Nexapp and Axify, reported a 23 percent savings on his total AWS bill in less than a month after using Stable.

Cloud costs will always change, but with FinOps, teams no longer have to manage them blindly. According to Pinet, companies practicing FinOps believe that clarity is as valuable as savings.

“Good decisions are made based on good information,” Pinet said. “FinOps gives companies both.”

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If you want to unlock the full potential of your AWS cloud investment and turn FinOps into a true superpower for your organization, contact Unicorne today.

Image courtesy of Unsplash. Photo by the author Groutika.