Cloud Unlocked, Eyes Opened: Welcome to the Age of FinOps
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In the modern digital enterprise, the cloud is no longer just a cost center, it’s a critical engine of innovation and competitive differentiation. Yet as cloud adoption and AI usage surges, so too does complexity in managing its usage and economics. Open your eyes or be resigned to draining your P&L statement.
Enter the Age of FinOps
FinOps is defined as a cultural and operational practice that brings together engineering, finance, and business teams to make informed, value-driven decisions about cloud usage. Once considered a niche discipline, FinOps is now the strategic enabler that is separating the Cloud Champions from those still trying to figure it out while acting like they know it all. And with the emergence of a new AI-driven world, all infrastructure is becoming AI infrastructure, and FinOps needs to evolve to manage the unpredictable costs and scaling dynamics of AI workloads.
FinOps is helping organizations align their AI and cloud infrastructure decisions with measurable business outcomes like revenue growth, customer value, and sustainability to drive value through cost and performance.
The Age of FinOps has arrived, redefining how organizations operate, aligning financial insight with technical execution at scale.
Understanding Business Economics in the Cloud
Of course, we all know that Cloud infrastructure offers agility and innovation, but it also decentralizes spend, leading to massive autonomy that complicates visibility and control. According to Flexera’s 2024 State of the Cloud Report, 84% of enterprises report cloud cost management as their top challenge.
Without a unified financial governance model, cloud costs spiral, budgets get misaligned, GPU spending is uncertain, and strategic decision-making falters. Does this sound familiar to anyone?
FinOps fills this gap by introducing business-centric financial discipline into cloud operations, creating a shared language for finance, engineering, and executives to make decisions grounded in real-time usage and value.
At its core, FinOps isn’t just about reducing cloud spend; it’s about maximizing business value which ultimately leads to increased market share, profits, and success. This is all sparked by understanding and leveraging true unit economics of cloud investments.
Unit economics refers to the ability to attribute cloud cost to specific business outcomes (e.g., revenue per transaction, cost per customer served). This enables organizations to bridge the gap between technical and business priorities.
Organizations that enter the Age of FinOps can now tie cloud costs to customer behavior, prioritize high-value workloads, and make informed tradeoffs between speed, reliability, and spend.
A Google Cloud case study on Spotify reveals how simply tagging and observability helped the company identify and allow real-time insights into how changes propagate through their infrastructure, tracking impact and ensuring accountability for each engineering team.
You Can’t Automate Culture
FinOps adoption often stumbles when organizations expect tools and technology to solve cultural problems. While many enterprise FinOps solutions offer visibility and optimization capabilities, they tend to fall short in multi-cloud and multi-cluster environments.
As a result, leading organizations invest a significant portion of their IT budgets in custom FinOps dashboards, integrations with observability stacks (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus), and partnerships with platform engineering teams to provide tooling with human workflows. This is evident when organizations have normalized running mission-critical workloads across multiple public clouds. Their investment grows exponentially when paired with legacy on-premises and edge applications that are dependent on their public cloud workloads. The need for accurate shared cost allocation and forecasting aligned to specific business KPIs are no longer simply nice to have; they are a new operational mandate and core competency driving accountability, agility, and financial discipline for modern IT organizations.
The New Stack notes that the mature organizations "don’t just look at cost reports — they build feedback loops that inform architectural decisions based on cost, reliability, and value." These types of feedback loops need to be expanded beyond the Finance or IT departments alone, as all areas of the organization need to maintain ownership and accountability.
The FinOps Foundation
The FinOps Foundation maintains a comprehensive Framework for practitioners to tie their Business and Technology Strategies together, because at the end of the day organizations need their cloud technology to provide real value. The FinOps Framework provides a dynamic, referenceable guide for those just beginning to crawl into the Age of FinOps as well as those running full-speed and leading the charge.
As Lydia Leong, distinguished vice president and analyst at Gartner said, “Properly done, FinOps helps an organization contemplate the business value it is receiving — or not receiving — from its cloud use, so it can decide how best to optimize its investments.”
And it is the real innovation that will make or break an organization and determine what future success will look like.
The Age of FinOps as the Strategic Growth Lever
FinOps has rapidly evolved from just another buzzword and niche practice into a strategic lever for digital businesses. It empowers organizations to:
Drive product decisions with an unprecedented level of financial intelligence.
Build true cross-functional trust through transparency and shared ownership.
Align innovation with business priorities that drive long-term success.
In today’s cloud-first landscape, as AI accelerates demands for infrastructure, those who embrace the Age of FinOps, both culturally and strategically, will outpace those who treat FinOps as an afterthought.
To learn more about how AI is transforming the future of infrastructure, watch a keynote by Mirantis CTO Shaun O’Meara, All Infrastructure is AI Infrastructure, from the recent RAISE Summit 2025.
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