After understanding the importance of timing in FinOps adoption, the next crucial step is establishing the right team and embedding a strong FinOps culture. Unlike traditional financial management practices, FinOps is an evolving discipline that thrives on collaboration, transparency, and shared responsibility.
Which professionals are responsible for managing FinOps?
According to the 2024 FinOps Foundation Report, 73% of organizations have seen double-digit cost savings after adopting FinOps principles. A well-structured FinOps team plays a pivotal role in driving cloud cost optimization and efficiency. Here’s how a successful FinOps team is typically structured:
- FinOps Practitioners: These individuals act as the core team responsible for executing FinOps strategies. They analyze cost data, implement best practices, and drive cost accountability.
- Engineering & Operations Teams: Cloud engineers and DevOps professionals work closely with FinOps practitioners to optimize cloud resources, ensuring efficiency without compromising performance.
- Finance & Procurement Teams: Their role is to align cloud investments with overall business goals, ensuring cost visibility, forecasting, and governance.
- Executive Sponsors: Leadership buy-in is critical for FinOps success. C-level executives, especially CIOs and CFOs, help drive FinOps adoption and enforce accountability across teams.
By breaking down silos and ensuring continuous communication, these teams create a seamless framework for cloud cost management.
How to Instill the FinOps Mindset in Organizations
FinOps is not just a process—it’s a mindset shift. The whole organization must be a part of it.
Key principles to embed the culture:
- Cross-functional teams must work together—bridging the gap between finance, engineering, and business stakeholders—to drive cloud cost optimization.
- Cloud investment decisions should align with business goals, ensuring that every dollar spent contributes to overall growth and efficiency.
- Cost accountability is not just for finance teams; engineers, product managers, and other stakeholders must be responsible for their cloud consumption.
- Transparent and real-time reporting is crucial for enabling data-driven decisions and preventing cloud waste.
Steps to Establish a FinOps Culture
- Start with Leadership Buy-In: Without executive support, FinOps initiatives can struggle to gain traction. (Companies with executive alignment are 2x more likely to scale FinOps successfully)
- Train and Educate Teams: Conducting workshops and training sessions helps teams understand FinOps improve practices.
- Implement Governance Policies: to foster transparency and accountability.
- Encourage a Data-Driven Approach: Empower teams with real-time cloud usage insights, so they can take proactive measures to optimize spending.
- Foster a Culture of Shared Responsibility: Cost ownership should not be an afterthought—it must be embedded into daily operations and decision-making processes.
A strong FinOps culture ensures that cloud cost management becomes an integrated part of your organization’s DNA. By fostering collaboration, financial accountability, and continuous improvement, businesses can maximize the value of their cloud investments.
In our next blog, we’ll explore FinOps Maturity Models: Crawl, Walk, Run, helping organizations assess their current state and strategize their growth.
Thanks for reading,
Richa Aggarwal