Adopting FinOps Balances Growth, Reliability, and Security

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Key Points:

• Adopting FinOps enhances rather than competes with growth, security, and reliability objectives when implemented through strategic cultural alignment and pilot programs.
• Organizations waste 27–50% of their cloud spend, making FinOps adoption essential for achieving financial accountability and a competitive advantage in modern cloud environments.
• Successful FinOps implementation requires dedicated expertise, automation guardrails, and a measurable ROI demonstration to justify expanded adoption across organizations.

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Engineering teams across organizations are challenged with balancing rapid innovation and growth with operational reliability, security requirements, and cost management. However, amidst this balancing act, cloud adoption is on the rise. As it does, many teams perceive FinOps as conflicting with their core objectives of delivering new features, maintaining system security, and ensuring reliable performance.

Mike Boudreau, Head of FinOps Delivery at Virtasant, sums up the challenge this way: "The main objective of developers or engineers is getting out a workable product. When somebody brings cost up to them as something to be concerned about, they don't have the space to consider it—they're trying to rapidly deploy a product.”

“We’ve had customers come to us, and we can prove to them with actual data that they're wasting more than 50% of the money that they spend every month on the cloud.”
—Mike Boudreau, Virtasant Head of FinOps Delivery

This perception creates a significant barrier to FinOps, often resulting in deprioritization. Teams worry that focusing on cost optimization will slow down development cycles, compromise security measures, or impact system reliability. When implemented strategically, adopting FinOps enhances all three priorities, providing the financial visibility and accountability necessary to make informed technical decisions that drive growth. In fact, amongst FinOps practitioners, “workload optimization and waste reduction” was found to be the number one priority in 2025.

The scale of potential impact becomes clear when considering that many organizations are wasting significant portions of their cloud spend. "We’ve had customers come to us, and we can prove to them with actual data that they're wasting more than 50% of the money that they spend every month on the cloud," Boudreau reveals.

Here, we provide a framework for integrating cost optimization without compromising growth, security, or reliability. We’ll start with the internal, cultural factors at play when adopting FinOps, working through deployment, and providing demonstrable ROI. By the end, you’ll have a clear view of what FinOps really is: an enabler, not a competitor, of growth, security, and reliability in your organization.

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Step 1: Alignment

Understanding the Cultural Shift in Adopting FinOps

The resistance to adopting FinOps is deeply rooted in culture.

The transition to cloud's pay-per-use model introduced a new layer of financial complexity that most engineering teams weren't prepared to handle. Before cloud computing, organizations would purchase or rent long-term infrastructure with fixed costs. Developers never had to worry about usage-based expenses because servers and other infrastructure were already acquired as sunk costs.

This context explains why many developers view cost management as an additional burden. They weren't trained to consider financial implications because those implications didn't exist in prior working environments. Successfully adopting FinOps requires acknowledging this cultural gap and addressing it through education, motivation, and the right incentives.

Different teams require different approaches when adopting FinOps principles. Development team leaders might discuss how cost savings can fund additional developer resources. For competitive teams within an organization, gamified dashboards showing efficiency metrics can drive healthy competition. For startups with limited runway, “why not start now saving as much as you can and make that a part of your DNA as you grow?" Boudreau suggests.

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Aligning FinOps with Core Business Priorities

Rather than viewing adopting FinOps as separate from existing priorities, successful organizations should integrate these considerations into their existing workflows and decision-making processes.

To inform growth objectives, teams can include cost-aware architecture reviews during feature development sprints. New product launches should establish cost budgets in conjunction with performance targets, and scaling decisions should incorporate cost data to inform infrastructure choices. This approach ensures that growth initiatives remain financially sustainable while maintaining development velocity.

Cost governance should weave tightly into security audits and compliance reviews. Teams can optimize spending on security tools without compromising coverage and treat cost overruns as operational risks that require the same level of urgency as security incidents. This perspective helps frame cost management as a risk mitigation strategy rather than a constraint. Far from an uncommon organizational challenge, cloud spend is projected to create a $400 billion market in 2025, with cloud costs ballooning to accommodate AI usage.

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Finally, integrating FinOps with reliability priorities requires tracking cost-per-transaction alongside traditional uptime metrics. Capacity planning should right-size resources based on actual usage patterns, and incident response procedures should include cost impact assessments in post-incident reviews. This approach ensures that reliability improvements don't come at unsustainable costs.

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Step 2: Low-Risk Pilot Programs & Measurable Goals

Boudreau emphasizes the importance of starting with "low-hanging fruit" where “there's pretty much guaranteed no impact on performance, security, reliability."

At Virtasant, we’ve developed a structured approach to FinOps optimization with difficulty levels ranging from zero through four. "Level zero is there are no changes. It's just reserving or buying savings plans," Boudreau explains. "It's a financial lever. So the only risk is if they end up reducing the amount of cloud resources that they use."

This level zero optimization represents the safest starting point when adopting FinOps—it's essentially applying discounts without changing any technical infrastructure, with no effect on resources, performance, reliability, or security.

The most effective pilot programs focus on non-production environments and development resources first. These environments typically offer significant optimization opportunities with minimal risk to business operations. A three-month pilot with a single department provides sufficient time to establish processes, identify challenges, and document wins for future scaling efforts.

During pilot programs, teams should focus on one optimization area per sprint, typically lasting one to two weeks quarterly. This concentrated approach allows teams to develop expertise gradually while maintaining their primary development responsibilities.

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Step 3: Set Goals Tied to Metrics

Establishing clear, quantifiable goals ensures that FinOps implementations align with and enhance existing business priorities. Below are several recommendations categorized across growth, security, and reliability:

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Growth

• Cost per new customer acquisition
• Infrastructure cost as a percentage of revenue growth
• Time-to-market improvements from optimized resources

Security

• Security tool ROI and utilization rates
• Cost of compliance per regulatory requirements
• Spend on security versus total cloud spend ratio

Reliability

• Cost per level of uptime
• Performance optimization savings
• Waste elimination without service degradation

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Step 4: Build Expertise and the Right Infrastructure

The complexity of cloud environments makes adopting FinOps a specialized discipline requiring dedicated expertise. "It takes so much to learn everything about cloud," Boudreau explains. "Trying to learn everything about FinOps, and everything about cloud, including all the different services from each of the cloud providers, is an impossible task. There's nobody that knows everything about any single Cloud Services Provider, even. It's just impossible."

This complexity extends beyond basic cloud knowledge to the sophisticated algorithms required for effective optimization. Virtasant has developed over 500 algorithms that analyze different opportunities for savings across all cloud providers.

Organizations typically benefit from dedicated FinOps specialists when they reach sufficient scale. "It starts to make sense when you're spending millions of dollars a year or a month in the cloud," notes Boudreau. But for smaller organizations, hiring full-time FinOps specialists may not provide positive ROI relative to their cloud spending.

“You can't put a small team that's developing and building a new product in charge of managing the finances of it, too. Eventually you need somebody to focus on managing the costs,” Boudreau emphasizes. “Here at Virtasant, we can tell them right away, this server is 10 times larger than it needs to be. And I can prove that to you based on the data -  you've never gone over 1% of its CPU. You can size it down and save all of that money and still get the same performance, reliability, growth, and security out of that smaller resource.”

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Creating the Right Infrastructure

One common challenge is that complex multi-cloud environments create visibility and governance difficulties. So rather than trying to manage each cloud provider separately, organizations should implement unified cloud management platforms that provide comprehensive visibility while maintaining centralized cost governance. Virtasant's Helias solution addresses this challenge by providing normalized data and analysis across all major cloud providers.

Virtasant's approach further reduces financial risk through its revenue-sharing model. "We actually don't charge for anything until we get savings results, and then our fees are based on  a percentage of those savings," Boudreau explains. This model contrasts with traditional consulting approaches that charge upfront fees regardless of results achieved.

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Bridging the FinOps Knowledge Gap

For organizations without internal FinOps expertise, several strategies can bridge the knowledge gap. Upskilling existing employees through targeted training programs can build foundational capabilities. Strategic partnerships with FinOps experts can provide part-time guidance during the adoption phase. At the highest tier, comprehensive managed FinOps solutions like Virtasant offer both platform access and expert guidance, enabling organizations to achieve results more quickly than internal efforts alone.

The timeline differences between internal and external approaches are significant. Internal efforts often take six to twelve months to capture approximately 25% of potential savings due to the learning curve and limited expertise. Working with specialized FinOps providers can accelerate this timeline dramatically—some organizations see results within four weeks when working with experienced FinOps specialists. In one case study, one of Europe’s largest retailers with $75B in annual revenue, realized a 50% reduction in cloud spend over the course of two years.

“You can't put a small team that's developing and building a new product in charge of managing the finances of it, too. Eventually you need somebody to focus on managing the costs.”

—Mike Boudreau, Virtasant Head of FinOps Delivery

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Step 5: Smart Automation and Guardrails

Effective automation serves as the backbone of successful FinOps adoption. Modern anomaly detection systems can identify unusual spending patterns before they become significant problems. These automated systems prevent the costly mistakes that can occur when teams are learning cloud optimization. Having proper alerts configured early can save you a fortune by catching issues like accidental auto-scaling misconfigurations that could result in massive, unexpected bills.

The sophistication of modern FinOps platforms goes far beyond simple threshold alerts. With Virtasant's Helias solution, organizations gain access to algorithms that continuously analyze cloud usage patterns and identify optimization opportunities. This automated analysis covers scenarios that would be impossible for teams to monitor manually across complex cloud environments.

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Step 6: Demonstrate ROI

Adopting FinOps successfully requires communicating value in ways that resonate with different stakeholders. For example, technical teams care about performance improvements and reduced operational overhead, while finance teams focus on cost savings, and executive leadership wants to see strategic business impact.

Finance leaders in particular play a crucial role in supporting FinOps adoption by understanding and communicating the strategic value of cloud cost optimization. The business case extends beyond simple cost reduction to encompass improved financial visibility, enhanced budget predictability, and better alignment between technology investments and business outcomes.

To demonstrate ROI, pilot programs should track multiple dimensions of success including team productivity improvements, resource utilization gains, direct cost savings achieved, and maintenance of security and reliability metrics. These measurements provide the foundation for justifying expanded FinOps adoption.

Long-term value tracking should demonstrate how FinOps enables business objectives rather than constraining them. Here’s what this looks like across the three areas we’ve been discussing:

• Growth: Optimized infrastructure enables faster scaling
• Security: Improved tool utilization and reduced compliance costs
• Reliability: Performance gains from right-sized resources

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Conclusion: FinOps as Strategic Enabler

FinOps doesn't compete with growth, security, and reliability objectives—it enhances them.

Organizations that approach FinOps adoption strategically find that cost optimization becomes a competitive advantage rather than a constraint. By aligning financial accountability with technical excellence, teams can innovate faster, secure systems more effectively, and maintain higher reliability standards while optimizing their cloud investments.

The complexity of modern cloud environments makes FinOps expertise increasingly valuable. Whether organizations choose to build internal capabilities or partner with specialists like Virtasant, the important step is beginning the adoption journey with clear goals, appropriate support, and realistic expectations.

In adopting FinOps practices, organizations only really stand to benefit. “There's guaranteed waste in there,” Boudreau underlines. “No one's immune from needing FinOps."

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