May 8,2025

With the critical importance of well-run and efficient cloud management practice for businesses today, including embracing FinOps, it is critical to stay on top of the latest trends and address emerging challenges before falling behind. The responsibilities behind cloud management and FinOps are constantly growing and with that as are the obstacles to running your operation effectively. Read on for our perspectives on the challenges facing teams today. 

Businesses are under pressure to justify costs and maximize value

The public cloud offers the ability to be more agile and innovative, buying services when they are needed that can scale with your business and meet your performance requirements as you grow. However, without proper management, expenses can quickly climb and run out of control. Cloud management teams have always been under pressure to manage these costs across users — no easy task as it is — and today are more often responsible for the reporting and analysis that their stakeholders need to justify the continuation of cloud expenses.

To run a successful FinOps practice, it is imperative to create a culture of accountability so that your management and governance activities are not only understood, but facilitated by the teams who ultimately benefit from them. At the heart of successful accountability is the accuracy and timeliness of data in the hands of those using cloud services, so they can contribute to overall management, optimization, and governance.

FinOps teams who facilitate the availability of data for stakeholders ensure that everyone is making decisions from the same systems of record. This also enables these stakeholders to remain aware of the costs they are incurring through their usage and the responsibility they have toward the overall efficiency and maximized value of their organization’s cloud strategy. At the end of the day, FinOps practitioners have an important and strenuous job — why not bring others in to share that responsibility and work together to drive desired outcomes?

Running a FinOps practice is easier said than done, especially without the right tool

As mentioned above, it is difficult enough to manage multiple cloud environments that may have many associated accounts and users. When FinOps teams are tasked with maximizing the value of these investments and keeping cost and usage under control, they are sometimes held back by the tools at their disposal. Many companies in the early days of cloud management or at the beginning of their FinOps journey may still be relying on spreadsheets to manage their cloud operation. This method is quickly exposed as one that is error-prone, requires many hours of manual work, and does not provide extended teams with timely and accurate data for decision-making. Similarly, organizations that use tools provided by cloud service providers or a third-party vendor that they chose early in their journey may find that they are quickly outgrowing these capabilities and need a more robust option to efficiently manage and operate.

As Cathal Cleary, Product Management lead at CloudHealth said in a recent interview, "The assessment of what your organization needs has to continually evolve. You need to keep assessing and keep talking to your constituents to make sure that you know what they need. You’ve got to remember that the goal of FinOps is to drive value out of your public cloud investments. Whether you build a tool, buy a tool, or use a cloud provider’s tool, it really should be about meeting needs.”

Organizations reviewing tooling options for their FinOps practice must consider the nature of public cloud management, which necessitates the ability to create valuable and tailored reporting at the scale of data made available by public cloud providers, as well as put the data to good use for optimization and governance activities. It is very easy to fall victim to "analysis paralysis" given the overwhelming amount of sources and quantity of data to consider and a tool that can normalize and make sense of this data for use in FinOps activities can be the difference between a successful practice or an obstructed journey.

Collaboration is key, but often not supported by tools and processes

Collaboration is a critical aspect of a successful FinOps practice — after all, with many users using multiple clouds, making decisions together for the greater good requires buy-in from all stakeholders and an understanding of the tooling and processes in place. Even when you have a willing set of stakeholders, the tools you use in your practice may not be successfully getting data in front of everyone in a timely and accurate manner. If you do have an existing tool in place, you may face the added challenge of enabling all your stakeholders on that tool or breaking down technical barriers with non-technical FinOps personals (such as finance, procurement, or line of business leaders).

To make the most of the tools and processes you've set up for your FinOps practice, it is imperative to ensure that all your stakeholders feel comfortable navigating your tools and processes on their own to an extent that becomes a sweet spot between acceptable independence and technical competence. At the beginning of your journey, this may look like engineers understanding the costs that their usage is driving, or a finance team being able to build a report specific to a desired line of business. At more advanced stages, you may have engineers starting and stopping instances on a schedule that meets their needs while saving costs, or finance teams building commitment recommendations or specific teams based on analysis of their historic expenditure. Ultimately, the result is a collaborative organization where everyone not only understands their role in driving value, but has the ability to act toward that goal on their own. 

AI is more than just a buzzword

No matter where you turn, AI seems to come up in one way or another. While it may be everywhere, it cannot be ignored as a true competitive differentiator — that is, if you are incorporating AI into your operations the right way. In the context of FinOps, it is important to first establish a key difference between FinOps for AI and AI for FinOps. FinOps for AI is the practice of FinOps to maximize the value of AI-related IT investments. AI for FinOps describes the application of AI to assist in the FinOps practice. 

When discussing AI for FinOps, users can easily take advantage of AI for simple tasks such as simple searches. However, more advanced AI for FinOps use cases can revolve around the creation of complex reports that would otherwise have required a seasoned technical veteran to produce and may not have been available right away due to that person's time constraints. Incorporating AI into a FinOps practice not only can help generate new forms of analysis that could have otherwise been overlooked, but can enable users without the necessary skills to generate these reports or uncover these insights through the use of natural language, patter detection or other AI-assisted capabilities that break down technical barriers to entry. 

Overall, the use of AI in FinOps is still quite new. However, FinOps is an evolving practice and the use of AI within that practice will certain be one of the fastest evolving characteristics over the next few years. 

Learn more

FinOps is evolving practice and presents businesses with new challenges and opportunities on a constant basis. If you'd like to discuss your FinOps challenges further, please reach out to the CloudHealth team!