The state of FinOps in 2025

It's time for real-time decisions

It's not just about the bottom line anymore.

Lisa Martin

"While FinOps has traditionally been about reducing costs, experts believe that 2025 will mark a big shift toward delivering greater business and customer value and higher performance," Martin said.

Hyoun Park

For a FinOps strategy to create more value and better performance, it needs data. FinOps can help enterprises stay on top of their costs on a daily basis. Hyoun Park, CEO and principal analyst at Amalgam Insights, sees an increased focus on near-real-time data and alerts. FinOps teams track this information to cut off inefficient tactics and activity quickly. Depending on the cloud workload, seconds count.

Marco Meinardi

You might, conventionally, review costs retrospectively once a quarter and then adjust. However, by this time, the damage is done. For example, a bug in an application can cause runaway resource consumption, racking up cloud costs. Someone within the organization could misuse cloud services for months. Real-time management helps organizations prevent such cloud waste before the billing impact becomes too large, said Marco Meinardi, research vice president at Gartner.

In addition to real-time capabilities, enterprises are aligning resources and services with specific business categories and taxonomies. It's a shift for IT departments.

"IT departments have too frequently pursued an ad hoc approach to tagging and resource categorization that has been useful for their specific roles but have not been broadly scalable to aligning cloud computing to the overall needs of the IT department and the business," Park said.

Let AI enhance FinOps strategies

Advanced and emerging technologies, like AI and machine learning (ML), are everywhere. By incorporating such technologies into IT cost management practices, enterprises can identify cost-saving opportunities and forecast resource usage.

"AI, predictive analytics and ML tools are transforming FinOps strategies because they enable organizations to make smarter decisions faster and course-correct in near-real time," Martin said. Enterprises should make "proactive, rather than reactive, decisions."

ML models can augment FinOps in multiple ways:

• Analyze historical cloud usage data to identify spending patterns and then use those patterns to forecast future costs and optimize as needed.
• Help enterprises assess risk, such as areas most likely to see cost overruns.
• Detect spending anomalies -- ML models are often used for anomaly detection, so a FinOps team can train a model to detect financial irregularities and fraud.
• Reduce duplicate and zero-usage systems.
• Find cost-effective alternatives.

Even generative AI (GenAI) has a role to play in FinOps. GenAI tools could analyze contract language to find discounting and cost analysis opportunities, as well as make competitive market comparisons with other vendors.

"The adoption of generative AI will help to make FinOps more accessible to nontechnical users and could be a facilitator of change management and cross-team collaboration," Martin said. Many GenAI tools are low-code/no-code, but there is still a learning curve for users.

However, these technologies are still evolving, and not all enterprises employ them. Based on the reported spend on managing FinOps and considering the current capabilities within leading tool options, Amalgam Insights estimated that less than 40% of enterprise cloud is managed with ML automation.

Remember that, even though these advanced technologies exist, it doesn't mean they are always the best tool for the job. "I heard from multiple sources that using statistical models [for forecasting] actually gives better results than AI/ML itself," Meinardi said.

Barriers still prevent successful FinOps adoption

FinOps faces challenges related to how companies treat their cloud initiatives.

The biggest barrier to FinOps adoption? Companies that do not treat cloud computing as a mature business capability and budget effectively for cloud costs, according to Park.

Cloud is still often treated as a standalone requirement to support emerging business use cases independent of cost or oversight, rather than as a cost center that can be optimized based on business needs.

"Cloud is still often treated as a standalone requirement to support emerging business use cases independent of cost or oversight, rather than as a cost center that can be optimized based on business needs," Park said.

To keep costs low, businesses must prioritize visibility into their cloud environment. "Inventory, usage, costs and contracts are interdependent," Park said. Assess the current inventory, collect a full record of all bills and accounts used to manage the cloud, and review the contracts and agreements associated with each account.

Another barrier to FinOps adoption is teams that resist disruption to their current, established processes. These functions cannot collaborate if they stay siloed.

"Change management is one of the hardest organizational shifts to execute because many organizations are highly siloed and used to it," Martin said. To adopt FinOps, goals must align among finance, engineering and other departments.

Teams should expect to communicate far more than before FinOps adoption, and they could face increased accountability and scrutiny over their work. This can make workers feel they are not doing their jobs properly. They might think FinOps teams exist to chase people down and single them out.

"Nobody [would] want to talk to the FinOps team. … Eventually, those conversations tend to be avoided … because nobody wants to hear, 'You're wasting money,'" Meinardi said.

A FinOps culture needs to exhibit transparency, provide accountability and empower cross-functional teams to understand and actively participate in cloud cost management.

To combat these negative views, enterprises need to change how they present FinOps. Meinardi suggested informing employees that the FinOps team is there in an advisory capacity to inform, not scrutinize. They are not direct decision-makers; they highlight opportunities for optimization and provide guidance.

"A FinOps culture needs to exhibit transparency, provide accountability and empower cross-functional teams to understand and actively participate in cloud cost management," Martin said.

The future of FinOps

FinOps shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, it is spreading into more areas. Park is starting to see FinOps aligning with other IT cost and financial management efforts, such as the following:

• IT financial management.
• Telecommunications expense management.
• Software asset management.
• IT asset management.
• Enterprise architecture management.

These processes all share aspects of inventory, usage, cost, service management, subscription management and sourcing with FinOps.

According to the "State of FinOps 2025 Report" by the FinOps Foundation, there is an increase in intersecting disciplines. The figure here shows that the greatest integrated team with FinOps is IT financial management. There is a growth in unification, compared to 2023, with IT asset management and technology business management.

Amalgam Insights expects to see a "continued amalgamation of these practices into a consolidated IT FinOps practice." This means areas such as network, voice, end-user devices, software licenses, APIs, servers, storage, compute and AI model uses come through a single team of IT fiscal managers who have visibility into their operations.

Similarly, Martin sees a convergence of FinOps with CloudOps, enabling organizations to manage cloud responsibilities across complex, multi-cloud and edge computing deployments.

"The future of FinOps is bright, with a forecasted expansion to broader cloud operations, such as SaaS, software licenses and data center infrastructure," Martin said.

Kathleen Casey is site editor for SearchCloudComputing. She plans and oversees the site and covers various cloud subjects, including infrastructure management, development and security.