Lately, I’ve found myself spending a lot of time on FinOps in my projects. Whether it’s modernizing cloud environments or helping teams scale smarter, cloud cost management keeps coming up.
This report offers a snapshot of how organizations are (or aren’t) evolving their cloud financial operations. The State of FinOps 2025 report paints a clear picture: FinOps is evolving beyond cloud cost management into a strategic function that spans SaaS, private cloud, AI, and more. As a CTO or technology leader, understanding where this movement is headed is crucial for aligning tech spend with business value and avoiding burnout within your organization...
What stood out to me:
- FinOps Has Evolved—It’s Now Cloud+:
- We’ve officially entered the Cloud+ era. FinOps teams are no longer focused solely on public cloud optimization—they’re extending into SaaS, licensing, private cloud, and AI. This expansion is not a future state; it’s already happening in leading organizations. For those of us responsible for scaling digital infrastructure, this requires a shift in mindset. FinOps isn’t just about managing OCI bills anymore—it’s a holistic approach to governing all forms of technology spend. Any FinOps strategy that doesn't address SaaS and private infrastructure is incomplete..
- AI Spend Is the New Black Box—Visibility Comes Before Efficiency:
- AI investments are growing fast, and they’re scattered across cloud, SaaS, and on-prem. What’s clear is that optimization isn’t the primary concern right now. Most organizations are still working to understand their AI spend, attribute it accurately, and align it with business outcomes. Attempting to optimize AI workloads without a clear view of where costs originate and what value they generate is risky. For FinOps to support AI at scale, foundations need to be laid around cost visibility and forecasting, especially in areas like model training, inferencing, and data pipeline costs.
- Optimization Is Table Stakes—Governance Is the Strategic Differentiator.
- The report reveals a sharp rise in prioritizing governance and policy at scale, surpassing workload optimization for the first time. This aligns with what many of us have seen: while early optimization efforts bring quick wins, sustainable efficiency requires policies, automation, and cultural change. It’s not enough to reduce spending after the fact. FinOps needs to be embedded into the way our teams architect, deploy, and operate systems. That means rethinking our tooling and enforcing standards. The maturity of your governance model will increasingly determine your ability to scale efficiently.
If we want a different 2025 FinOps story, it starts with leadership.
The 2025 State of FinOps reinforces what many of us already sense: financial accountability is no longer just a finance or operations function—it’s a shared leadership priority. CTOs are in a position to shape how organizations engage with FinOps—not just as a discipline, but as a mindset.
The question is no longer whether you have a FinOps function, but whether you’re leveraging it strategically across every part of your technology stack.
Curious how other leaders are navigating this — what’s worked for you in making FinOps a strategic, cross-functional priority?