Imagine your company’s cloud environment is a bustling marketplace. Every click, data transfer, and resource allocation represents another transaction essential to keeping operations running smoothly. But what if you could ensure that every dollar spent in this digital marketplace directly fuels your business goals? Enter FinOps – a strategic practice of managing cloud spending that goes beyond mere cost-cutting to achieve genuine value alignment.

What is a cloud cost optimisation assessment (FinOps assessment)?

To start, let’s clarify what a FinOps assessment (also called a cloud cost optimisation assessment) really is.

Simply put, a FinOps assessment is more than a budget review; it’s a deep dive into how well your cloud spend aligns with the value it brings to your organisation. Think of it as a health check for your cloud investments, one that extends beyond surface-level cuts to focus on strategic alignment with business goals. This assessment evaluates your current processes, tools, and team practices to identify where you can make smarter, more agile financial decisions.

By pinpointing gaps and highlighting best practices, a FinOps assessment provides a roadmap to streamline cloud usage, reduce unnecessary cloud costs, and ensure that every dollar spent contributes to growth, innovation, or operational efficiency.

Why is cloud cost optimisation important?

Cloud cost optimisation is essential for every organisation because, without it, cloud expenses can quickly spiral out of control, impacting profitability and stifling innovation.

As companies scale, it’s easy for teams to lose track of how cloud resources are allocated, leading to waste and inefficiencies that drain budgets without delivering tangible business value.

Cloud cost optimisation empowers businesses to take back control by ensuring that each dollar spent supports business goals – whether that’s driving revenue, improving customer experiences, or funding future initiatives.

Moreover, cloud cost optimisation isn’t just about saving money; it’s about building a culture of financial accountability and collaboration across teams. When done well, it enables faster decision-making, enhances agility, and turns cloud spending from a wildcard expense into a strategic lever for growth.

Additionally, cloud cost optimisation is about adapting the entire cloud infrastructure to the client’s current and future needs. As businesses evolve, their cloud requirements often change. The existing cloud architecture may no longer align with the organisation’s objectives, leading to over-provisioning or under-utilisation of resources. In such cases, the cloud environment can become ill-adapted, more expensive, and inefficient.

Read more:

• The Cloud FinOps Guide: mastering cloud finances
• Benefits of a Cloud FinOps adoption in your organization

How can a FinOps assessment help reduce unnecessary cloud costs?

But how exactly can a FinOps assessment help reduce unnecessary cloud costs? It does so by identifying specific areas where resources are underutilised, misallocated, or simply forgotten. In many cloud environments, these “silent spenders” can be surprisingly common and costly.

Frequent culprits include idle instances – idle resources that run but aren’t actively used. Similarly, over-provisioned resources, where companies pay for more capacity than needed, add up quickly. Other common areas of waste include duplicated storage, orphaned volumes from deleted virtual machines, and underutilised reserved instances.

Examining your cloud environment through a FinOps lens helps you uncover these inefficiencies and set up controls to prevent them in the future. This assessment not only highlights immediate savings opportunities but also equips teams with strategies to continuously monitor, adjust, and align cloud spend with real-time usage and business value.

Ultimately, a FinOps assessment doesn’t just optimise cloud – it helps introduce a proactive approach to cloud management across the organisation.

What metrics are typically analysed during a FinOps assessment?

Let’s now look at metrics that are typically analysed during a FinOps assessment. Their role is to gauge the efficiency, alignment, and accountability of cloud spending.

Beyond basic usage and cost, a successful assessment evaluates organisational behaviours, financial planning, and operational efficiency.

Key metrics include accountability and enablement, which gauge how well teams understand and manage cloud costs, and cost optimisation, which examines whether resources are configured for optimal spending.

Additionally, cloud allocation ensures resources are tagged accurately for transparency, while forecast accuracy reflects planning precision, aligning future costs with usage.

Tools and accelerators assess the effectiveness of FinOps tools in managing costs, while performance metrics like latency ensure operational efficiency, verifying that resource spending aligns with business objectives.

How does a cloud cost optimisation assessment differ for various cloud providers (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP)?

A cloud cost optimisation assessment can vary significantly depending on the cloud provider, as each platform – AWS, Azure, GCP – has its own pricing structures, discount programs, and native tools for cost management.

For instance, AWS offers Reserved Instances and Savings Plans, while Azure provides Reserved VM Instances and Hybrid Benefits, each with unique terms and savings opportunities. GCP’s approach includes Committed Use Contracts and sustained use discounts, which have different usage thresholds and billing models.

These distinctions mean that an assessment for AWS might focus heavily on optimising EC2 Reserved Instances, whereas an Azure assessment might emphasise leveraging Hybrid Benefits to reduce licensing costs. Additionally, each provider’s reporting tools and APIs differ in functionality, so the methods of gathering, tagging, and analysing resource usage also need to be customised.

Cloud cost optimisation assessments can also benefit from partnerships with the cloud providers themselves or third-party consulting firms. Many cloud providers offer dedicated support, discounted services, or specialised tools to partners, which can give businesses access to additional cost-saving opportunities.

Partnering with experts or cloud consultants who have extensive experience with a specific provider’s platform can also provide valuable insights and tailored strategies to optimise cloud spend more effectively. These partnerships often bring exclusive discounts, enhanced technical support, and access to early adoption programs that can further reduce costs and improve operational efficiency.

Listen to my conversation with Adam Grabek, as we explain how companies often lose money in the cloud due to inefficient management practices:

How often should a cloud cost assessment be performed?

Now that we understand its importance and the benefits it can bring, let’s examine how often a cloud cost assessment should be performed. Ideally, it should be conducted once and then it becomes a regular – monthly or quarterly – practice of cloud teams, crucial to keep pace with the dynamic nature of cloud environments.

Cloud usage fluctuates as teams launch new projects, scale applications, and adjust to changing customer demands, making it crucial to monitor and optimise spending frequently. Such regular assessments help organisations catch early signs of over-provisioning, unused resources, or missed savings opportunities, which can accumulate quickly if left unchecked.

For organisations with complex, multi-cloud environments or rapid growth, a monthly review may be most effective, allowing teams to stay agile and make continuous adjustments. On the other hand, companies with more stable workloads may find that quarterly assessments strike the right balance between diligence and practicality.

Looking to optimise your cloud spending and align it with your business objectives? Future Processing is here to help. Don’t let unnecessary costs drain your resources – contact us today to discover how we can support your cloud cost optimisation efforts and enhance your operational efficiency. Let’s turn your cloud investments into a strategic advantage!