Why top performers make FinOps a strategic priority

Today, many organisations face a challenge with their cloud costs.

In fact, recent research from SoftwareOne revealed 46% of companies saying their cloud costs were too high with another 20% stating their IT spending as a whole needed a complete overhaul. These views may even be optimistic: Gartner noted in a recent report that 60% of IT teams underestimate cloud expenses, resulting in cost overruns.

Campanies that believe their costs are too high

On the plus side, our research also identified a select group of high performers (we call them ‘Optimised Innovators’) who are solving this challenge in a way that not only controls costs but actually helps accelerate growth.

These are organisations which have already established strong cost control systems and advanced cloud foundations. Now, they are taking the next logical step forward: making FinOps implementation their number one cloud transformation priority for the next two years.

As we’ll see, this is a strategic focus that will help maximise returns on their existing technical investments while generating new funds to power continued innovation.

More than just cost-cutting

FinOps—a portmanteau of Finance and DevOps—is a cultural practice that brings IT, finance, and business teams together to optimise cloud costs and drive return on investment while maintaining speed and quality.

What is FinOps?

“Finops is an operational framework and cultural practice which maximises the business value of cloud and technology, enables timely data-driven decision making, and creates financial accountability through collaboration between engineering, finance and business teams.”

FinOps Foundation Technical Advisory Council, 2025

The three core principles underpinning its effectiveness are:

• Visibility: Providing real-time insights into cloud spend across all environments
• Optimisation: Continuously identifying and implementing cost-saving opportunities
• Accountability: Ensuring every team takes ownership of their cloud usage and costs

What makes FinOps particularly powerful is how it transforms cloud cost management from a periodic review into an ongoing practice. Rather than reacting to unexpected bills, organisations gain the ability to predict, control, and optimise their cloud spend proactively. And that in turn can drive a flywheel of cost optimised innovation and growth that delivers value far beyond simply cutting costs.

Cost optimisation becomes ‘business as usual’ rather than a fire drill that only happens after costs have got out of control.

Driving the flywheel with FinOps

Using this flywheel approach, each round of optimisation funds the next wave of innovation, creating a self-sustaining cycle of continuous improvement.

Our research revealed that Optimised Innovators deliberately build and maintain this flywheel, with FinOps playing a crucial role in identifying and capturing the savings that fuel the cycle.

These outliers have discovered something that competitors miss: robust financial management (cost optimisation) doesn't just control cloud costs—it's a critical catalyst that accelerates innovation too.

The business impact of effective FinOps

SoftwareOne’s own client engagements consistently illustrate how the adoption of FinOps delivers measurable cost optimisation and business value across industries.

Examples that stick in my mind include Zorg Spectrum—a healthcare provider—achieving an extraordinary 75% reduction in cloud spending, enabling reinvestment into patient care initiatives. Similarly, a financial services firm that we helped save $500K in cloud costs while simultaneously maturing its internal capabilities so that it could benefit from long-term FinOps management. And a global energy company that partnered with SoftwareOne to implement a FinOps strategy delivering $2.5 million in cloud cost savings while improving visibility and accountability across departments. Finally, Alpine Health Technologies—a healthcare IT provider—optimised its Azure cloud environment with SoftwareOne’s FinOps services, achieving $150K in savings over three years, while enhancing budget forecasting and accelerating innovation for healthcare solutions.

These success stories (and there are many more) demonstrate just how effectively FinOps transforms cloud investments from mere expenditures into strategic enablers of growth and innovation. By fostering financial accountability and operational efficiency, organisations can achieve tangible results such as cost savings, improved collaboration, and enhanced agility.

That’s good news whatever business you’re in—especially when you realise that almost any organisation can begin to achieve comparable results by taking four simple steps.

Four steps to FinOps

Contrary to popular misconceptions, FinOps isn’t necessarily complicated—nor is it only for the very largest organisations.

In fact, our latest research (focused on mid-market companies) as well as our wider experience at SoftwareOne shows that for almost any company meaningful progress towards the efficiencies of FinOps can begin with simple steps. It’s not the whole FinOps journey by any means, but these steps should certainly provide a solid start:

1. Establish visibility

• Deploy cloud cost monitoring tools
• Create consistent tagging and categorisation strategies
• Develop dashboards that provide real-time spending insights
• Ensure all stakeholders have appropriate access to cost data

2. Build cross-functional collaboration

• Form a FinOps team with IT, finance, and business representatives
• Define clear roles and responsibilities
• Establish regular review cadences
• Create shared KPIs that balance cost and performance

3. Implement optimisation processes

• Identify and eliminate unused resources
• Right-size over-provisioned services
• Use reserved instances and savings plans

4. Drive accountability through showback/chargeback

• Attribute cloud costs to specific teams or projects
• Build cost awareness into development and operational processes
• Create incentives for cost-efficient behaviour
• Make cloud spending transparent and understandable