5 real-world FinOps use cases to maximize ROI

1. Tagging governance to drive savings & availability

Ouribank, a fintech leader in financial services in Brazil, worked with Everest to focus its FinOps strategy. When they started, cost visibility remained fragmented across development, operations and finance teams. Rather than pursuing immediate cost cuts, they followed the FinOps Foundation's framework for a phased roadmap, which was stewarded by a dedicated FinOps specialist.

They prioritized low-operational quick wins in numerous ways, including:

• Shutting down idle resources.
• Automating development and test environment shutdowns during off-hours.
• Migrating AWS ECS Fargate workloads from on-demand to spot pricing.
• Reducing over-provisioned resources.
• Implementing Amazon S3 lifecycle policies
• Upgrading Amazon EBS volumes to gp3 with optimized IOPS allocation.

The second phase focused on structured Savings Plans and Reserved Instances purchases for medium-term resource needs. In the first year, they

• Reduced cloud costs by 60%.
• Increased availability and processing capacity by 18%.
• Scaled cost tagging from 0% to 94%.

"Tagging governance serves as the foundation for chargeback maturity, enabling precise cost attribution at granular levels," said Titus M. This phased crawl, walk and run approach typically requires 12-18 months from initial visibility to mature chargeback operations.

2. Centralized FinOps for infrastructure optimization

Aykut Duman, a partner in Kearney's Digital & Analytics practice, worked with one leading US telco to guide its FinOps journey. This process involved a cross-disciplinary focus on cost analysis, allocation and optimization across multiple cloud environments. The groundwork helped the telco link visibility and context across billing, workloads and consumption data.

The multidisciplinary aspect involved working with finance, IT and procurement teams. It has also improved the ability to allocate cloud costs to specific workloads and business owners. Multiple people can collaborate to identify and pursue rightsizing opportunities by taking advantage of reservations and savings plans. Duman said they are realizing savings of 5-10% and have achieved about 1% variance in budget accuracy.

3. Turning cost into an engineering signal

Philipp Jung, a senior partner in Kearney's Digital & Analytics practice, worked with a leading digital media company on a project to improve developer cost visibility to drive behavior change. The first step was to find ways to embed cost data directly into engineering workflows and to incentivize their use.

"The aim wasn't only to cut spending but to make cost a first-class engineering signal like latency or reliability," said Jung.

The company reported saving millions within the first few months of making costs visible and actionable. A key insight was finding ways to surface cost data directly into the engineering team's existing tools. This allowed developers to see and prioritize cost optimizations associated with products without leaving their tools.

4. Improving governance across the enterprise

Will Thomas, managing director and cloud optimization lead at Protiviti, recently conducted a proof-of-value engagement with a client that had adopted a FinOps tool. Nearly immediately, they improved visibility into waste across the entire enterprise, extending beyond their cloud footprint.

"By implementing better tagging practices, we can assign unused services to the business while establishing and enforcing policies across all resources for accurate chargebacks and reporting," said Thomas.

He has found that improving processes to identify waste, such as orphaned resources, rightsizing and reservations, typically uncovers 10-30% overspend, thereby offering quick cost-reduction opportunities.

5. Better ways of working

Thomas noted that a secondary use case that continues to emerge in more mature FinOps deployments is the discovery of more efficient workflows.

"FinOps thrives when finance, engineering and business units collaborate, whereas treating FinOps as an IT-only or finance-only project limits impact," said Thomas

This requires setting clear goals and accountability, along with defining KPIs like spending reduction targets and unit cost metrics. It's also important to assign decision rights to mid-level managers to accelerate outcomes.

"Organizations are able to operate more efficiently, observe daily run rates and provide executives with a clear understanding of the unit economics of their cloud spend," Thomas said.

George Lawton is a journalist based in London. Over the last 30 years, he has written more than 3,000 stories about computers, communications, knowledge management, business, health and other areas that interest him.