When a company receives its monthly cloud bill of 180,000 euros and nobody can precisely explain what those costs correspond to, it's a symptom of a governance problem — not a technology problem. FinOps provides a structured answer.
The 3 phases of FinOps
Inform: make costs visible and attributable. Each team must know how much their resources cost in real-time. Systematic resource tagging is the non-negotiable prerequisite. Optimize: identify and eliminate waste. Oversized instances, orphaned resources, dev environments running 24/7 — the savings opportunities are often considerable. Operate: embed the FinOps culture in the organization. Team budgets, automatic alerts, monthly cost reviews, and integration into architectural decision processes.
Case study: -42% on AWS bill in 4 months
A French SaaS vendor was spending 95,000 euros/month on AWS without granular visibility. In 4 months of FinOps engagement, we: implemented complete tagging (100% of resources tracked), identified 38,000 euros/month of pure waste, negotiated appropriate Savings Plans, and automated stop/start of environments. Final bill: 55,000 euros/month — savings of 480,000 euros/year.
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About the author
AM
Alexandre MARTIN
Lead Architect, ACCENSEO
AWS and Azure certified cloud architect with 12 years of experience. Alexandre helps enterprises design and migrate to resilient distributed architectures.
