Many of us have been in the wonderful world of Excel, trying to predict our Azure spending for the next year. Budget planning for cloud spending isn’t easy. You have been using Excel spreadsheets to forecast future spending. There are many unknowns, such as which projects will be undertaken and what resources you may need for those projects. Additionally, you might be trying to find out how much your current cloud infrastructure spending is, just to be able make your life and decision making a little easier. As an example, you might want to know the specific costs for some individual systems and ponder if the costs are stable, or are they trending upward or even downward? And who has the answers? Who would be the right person to ask about those costs? These questions are crucial as you grapple with your current spending. This is where proper FinOps for cloud comes to help you! 

Unfortunately, I got bad news for you… it won’t fix your budget for the year 2025, but it may help you in the future if you act fast. What it will do however is that it will help you in 2025 to analyse the costs and help you to fix your budget for 2026. Why this is so? Simply because you need to have a proper FinOps strategy implemented and acquire data accordingly, so you can use this as a tool. Surely there are fast ways to get visibility to your cost like using Azure tagging feature and making reports out from it. This is your quick win that will help you now, but making FinOps in a proper way will require some thought work on how your organization allocates costs and cooperation with finance departments and product/service owners.

How FinOps helps

FinOps (Financial Operations) gives you visibility into your cloud costs and helps you control them. It’s a strategy for tracking, allocating, and optimizing cloud spending. Without it, you’re guessing – and guesses often cost money. 

When you start to investigate this, some of these findings may lead to bigger changes in how you should use your Azure and how resources are placed there. Microsoft CAF aims to help you in this aspect as well, but let’s be honest, it is not for all organizations the best and fitting without modification. This will require some work and thinking about what is right for your organization and what will make your life and your CcoE’s (Cloud Centre of Excellence) life a little easier. Once you do this in a proper way, you can ensure that your Azure cloud governance aligns with your FinOps strategy. If you don’t already have a governance framework in place, this would be the perfect opportunity to establish that one too.

Steps to get started with FinOps

Here’s how you can begin implementing FinOps and improve your cloud budget process: 

1. Start with Cost Visibility 

• Use Azure tagging to track costs by project, team, organization. Environment or cost centre. 
• Create reports in Azure Cost Management to understand your current spending. 
• Identify patterns: Are costs increasing? Which systems or services cost the most? 

2. Analyse and Optimize 

• Look for quick wins: 
  • Remove unused resources. 
  • Right-size oversized resources. 
  • Review duplicated services and decide if they can be consolidated or shut down. 
• For longer term: 
  • Purchase reservations 
  • Implement scaling or auto shutdown of resources 
  • Modernizes solutions to use PaaS 

3. Allocate Costs 

• Work with your finance team to allocate costs to the right organization, projects or teams. 
• Use this data to plan budgets based on actual usage, not assumptions. 

4. Align Governance and FinOps 

• Update your Azure governance framework to align with your FinOps strategy. 
• Develop a FinOps strategy where costs are continuously tracked and reviewed, making it an ongoing process and a new way of working 

Once you have successfully implemented your first steps in FinOps strategy and visibility, the next step will be analysing and optimize your costs. There are some quick wins what can be implemented quickly to save your budget, but there are some long-term actions as well that may need its own project to be completed. 

This is where you can now start to a have meaningful discussions in your organization: Are certain services worth the cost, or are there duplicated services that could be discontinued in the first place? 

Then you should have discussion with your Finance teams how you could allocate and direct your costs to right departments / projects. After all, the responsibility of carrying costs shouldn’t fall solely on IT, everyone should be accountable for their own costs. This requires new kind of mindset inside of whole organization. So therefore, FinOps is not just analysing, new tools or modernizing, it is change of mindset how we see IT and Azure infrastructure.

Tools to support FinOps

Microsoft Azure offers tools to simplify FinOps: 

• Azure Cost Management: Helps you monitor and manage spending. 
• Azure Budgets: Helps you find sudden unpredicted changes on cost and tracking. 
• Tagging: way to more granularly organize your resources and costs 
• Automation: scaling, start and stop resources automatically 
• Policies: ensure that correct resources are used and prevent expensive or unwanted resources to be deployed 
• CAF (Cloud Adoption Framework): Provides guidance for organizing your cloud setup. It may need customization to fit your organization’s needs. 
• Power BI: Gives you a user-friendly way to visualize and share cost data to stakeholders and business owners.

What happens next?

Once you’ve set up a FinOps process and mindset, it becomes part of your team’s regular workflow. Analysing costs and optimizing resources should happen monthly or even more often if resources change quickly, for example due to a new solution implementation project. It’s not a one-time fix; it’s an ongoing process. 

For example, in our managed Azure services, we regularly review costs and spot anomalies. Then we take actions early to help avoid unnecessary expenses.

Final thoughts

FinOps isn’t just a buzzword. It’s about creating clear visibility and strategy for your cloud spending. With the tools Azure provides and some collaboration across teams, you can make better budgeting decisions and reduce costs. 

Implementing FinOps thinking into your work and starting to make changes in how you view things is a good start. This is, however, something that will come to your teams’ daily or monthly lives. As we know, everything in cloud costs, therefore as well FinOps or cost control, if you like, requires its own processes and ways to do things. Zure platform engineers, architects and consultants have been doing this for years already, and it is built into our way of working in Managed Azure services. Zure reviews costs and finds anomalies, allowing us to react before they become too big of a problem. 

Does this all sound a bit big for your needs? I can ensure it is not really. In this industry, we just like to use fancy words like FinOps or CCoE. In the end, this is all about making visibility and strategy for your cloud spending with tools that Microsoft Azure provides, and a more advanced user-friendly outlook can be achieved with Power BI. 

As well, lucky you are not alone in this, and we can help you to make your life easier! 

Ready to start? We can guide you through the process and make your cloud budget manageable with our Advisory services. Plus, our Managed Azure engineers will help you plan long-lasting, continuous processes. Let’s kick off your FinOps journey!