Author: Mike Wood, Certero Development Manager
The Problem That Sparked a Movement
With the rise of DevOps in the late 2000s seeking to breakdown the silos, it empowered teams to move faster. Then came the rise of cloud, this changed everything, now you could both move at incredible speeds whilst potentially spending at speeds. Gone were the physical servers and predictable and planned CapEx spend, and in it’s stead businesses raced to adopt AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform (among others). In doing this IT gained unprecedented speed and autonomy thanks to the DevOps revolution, coupled with the rise of cloud, but two overlooked things happened:
- Finance lost visibility and control over spending.
- Suddenly, engineers could spin up $5,000 environments in minutes. And no one from procurement or finance was in the loop.
This wasn’t just about “spending too much.” It was about spending without governance, forecasting without accuracy, and buying without collaboration.
From DevOps to FinOps – The Missing Link
In the early 2010s, DevOps revolutionized the way development and operations teams collaborated. It introduced automation, speed, and shared accountability. For most of us developers it felt like a golden age, I still remember the feeling of freedom when we moved to CI/CD pipelines from the, now archaic, manual deployments and form heavy change control, CABs, sign-offs, just to push a bug fix.
But as DevOps scaled in the cloud era, it accidentally created a cost challenge:
- Decentralized ownership of infrastructure
- Elastic resources leading to volatile bills
- No financial context built into engineering workflows
This tension led to an urgent question: “How do we keep the agility of DevOps while managing costs like a business?”
For some companies, they wanted to pull out of the cloud completely, a knee-jerk reaction to simply not knowing how they could maintain financial control without going back to the old ways of management.
Enter FinOps.
The Emergence of FinOps
FinOps (Cloud Financial Operations) was born as a framework to bring Finance, IT, and Engineering together under a shared goal: cost-efficient cloud operations.
The term gained traction around 2018, when the FinOps Foundation was created (now part of the Linux Foundation). They defined FinOps as: “The practice of bringing financial accountability to the variable spend model of the cloud, enabling distributed teams to make business trade-offs between speed, cost, and quality.”
- The FinOps Foundation outlines three core phases of FinOps:
- Inform – Visibility, allocation, and benchmarking
- Optimize – Rightsizing, waste reduction, and purchasing strategies
- Operate – Ongoing governance, forecasting, and cultural alignment
And most importantly:
“FinOps is a team sport.” Meaning that Finance, Engineering, and Product must share responsibility for cloud spend decisions.
Starting the Journey
Once you begin to look through the FinOps Framework it can be overwhelming, there is a lot of information to get your head around. We will be adding more posts over the coming weeks to help enable you to take actionable steps towards a mature FinOps level.
As the old saying goes “The longest journey still starts with a single step”, try not to be overwhelmed by getting to the highest maturity level, instead focus on simple, actionable steps:
- Use FOCUS cost data – Focus cost data specification is a universal specification and as such it make it easier to compare apples with apples. For example the resource type in Azure could be called “Blob Storage” and in AWS “S3”, Focus Normalizes both of these to “Storage”. When doing analysis, however you prefer to do it, this can make it more useful and less disjointed.
- Engage with Teams – Having teams collaborate to understand where potential rightsizing and waste is invaluable, understanding the needs of all teams can lead to greater savings.
Where SaaS Enters the Picture
Originally, FinOps was focused heavily on cloud infrastructure (IaaS). But in recent years, companies realized SaaS is often a bigger cost center, and just as hard to manage.
Modern FinOps now includes:
- SaaS spend visibility
- License optimization
- Renewal governance
- Shadow IT detection
- AI Spend Management
Platforms like CerteroX are helping organizations bring both SaaS and cloud under a single FinOps strategy—unlocking complete control over digital operations spend.
The rise of FinOps mirrors the broader evolution of IT: from siloed cost centers to business-critical functions. As organizations continue to scale in the cloud and adopt more SaaS tools, FinOps isn’t just “nice to have”, it’s foundational.
If you’re looking to bring your FinOps practice into the modern era, across cloud, SaaS, and shadow IT, explore how CerteroX can help.
