Businesses of every size, from startups to large enterprises, rely on public, private, and hybrid cloud platforms to scale, innovate, and reduce time-to-market. But as organizations embrace multi-cloud strategies using services from AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and others the complexity of managing cloud costs increases dramatically.
According to a Gartner report, more than 80% of enterprises will adopt a multi-cloud strategy by 2025. While this offers resilience and flexibility, it also multiplies billing models, governance challenges, and the risk of overspending. In fact, Flexera’s State of the Cloud report found that enterprises waste over 30% of their cloud spend annually due to inefficiencies and lack of visibility.
This is where FinOps a discipline blending financial accountability with operational agility becomes the key to sustainable cloud financial management.
In this guide, we’ll explore why FinOps is critical for managing multi-cloud costs, the best practices you should adopt, and how Embee Software’s expertise in Azure FinOps and cloud cost control can deliver measurable ROI.
What Is FinOps?
FinOps (short for “Financial Operations”) is not just a cost-cutting exercise, it’s a cultural and operational shift that ensures cloud spending decisions are made collaboratively and strategically. The FinOps Foundation defines it as “an evolving cloud financial management discipline and cultural practice that enables organizations to get maximum business value by helping engineering, finance, technology, and business teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions.”
Key pillars of FinOps include:
- Collaboration across teams: Finance, engineering, and operations work together, ensuring everyone is accountable for cloud costs.
- Real-time visibility: Using dashboards, cloud billing APIs, and analytics to monitor spend continuously instead of waiting for end-of-month surprises.
- Data-driven decisions: Leveraging insights to right-size resources, eliminate waste, and optimize pricing models.
- Continuous improvement: Treating cost optimization as an ongoing journey, not a one-time initiative.
Why Multi-Cloud Demands FinOps?
A multi-cloud strategy involves running workloads across two or more public cloud providers. Businesses adopt this to avoid vendor lock-in, take advantage of best-in-class services, and build resilience. (Wikipedia – Multicloud)
While multi-cloud has clear benefits, it introduces several cost management challenges:
- Inconsistent billing models: Each cloud provider has unique pricing, discount structures, and billing cycles.
- Hidden costs: Data egress fees, idle resources, and shadow IT usage can inflate bills.
- Governance complexity: Without a centralized system, tracking budgets and policies across clouds becomes chaotic.
- Limited visibility: Finance teams often struggle to consolidate costs into a single view, making accountability difficult.
By implementing FinOps best practices, organizations can standardize governance, automate reporting, and proactively optimize spend across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
For example, Embee Software’s Azure FinOps approach helps clients leverage features such as Azure Hybrid Benefit, reserved instances, and cost management dashboards to streamline governance and maximize ROI.
FinOps Best Practices for Cloud Cost Control
Implementing FinOps requires a structured playbook. Here are proven FinOps best practices every organization should adopt:
1. Right-size Your Resources
Provision only the resources you need. Overprovisioning leads to waste, while under provisioning risks performance issues. Tools like Azure Advisor and AWS Compute Optimizer recommend optimal VM sizes.
2. Use Reserved Instances and Savings Plans
For predictable workloads, long-term commitments like Azure Reserved VM Instances or AWS Savings Plans can reduce costs by up to 72%.
3. Automate Scaling and Scheduling
Enable auto-scaling for demand spikes and shut down non-production workloads during off-hours.
4. Optimize Storage
Tier storage into hot, cool, and archive categories. Azure Blob Storage lifecycle policies help manage long-term data efficiently.
5. Eliminate Zombie Resources
Unattached storage volumes, idle VMs, or outdated snapshots silently drain budgets. Regular audits ensure you only pay for what you use.
6. Implement Cost Visibility
Dashboards from Azure Cost Management or third-party tools like Apptio Cloudability offer transparency.
7. Set Budgets and Alerts
Cloud providers allow setting alerts for budget thresholds. This prevents runaway costs.
8. Refactor to Cloud-Native
Migrating to cloud-native architectures like containers, serverless, and microservices improves efficiency. (Microsoft – Cloud Native)
9. Review Licensing and Subscriptions
Many enterprises pay for unused SaaS licenses or duplicate subscriptions. A cloud licensing review can cut costs instantly.
10. Build a FinOps Culture
Cost control is not just IT’s responsibility. Encourage a culture where every department considers cloud cost implications before provisioning services.
These best practices align with the FinOps Foundation’s maturity model, moving organizations from “inform” to “optimize” and finally “operate.”
Multi-Cloud FinOps Strategies
Managing costs across multiple cloud providers requires more advanced tactics. Embee guides clients with:
- Unified Dashboards: Consolidating spend across AWS, Azure, and GCP for holistic visibility.
- Policy Automation: Enforcing governance rules across clouds through APIs and management platforms.
- Cost Optimization: Leveraging spot instances, committed use discounts, and cloud-agnostic scaling.
- Tagging and Allocation: Tagging resources ensures cost accountability by department or project.
Embee Software’ Approach to FinOps
- Azure FinOps expertise: Maximizing savings with reserved instances, Azure Hybrid Benefit, and storage optimization.
- Automation: Implementing schedules, right-sizing, and policy enforcement at scale.
- Governance: Establishing budgets, alerts, and cost accountability across teams.
- End-to-end services: From cloud migration and licensing to disaster recovery and analytics.
Our clients, such as Hero FinCorp, have leveraged Embee Software’s cloud cost optimization services to implement disaster recovery on Azure while cutting costs by over 30%.
FinOps in Action: Real-World Use Cases
- Financial Services Firm: Reduced monthly Azure spend by 40% through automation and reserved instances.
- Manufacturing Enterprise: Achieved full visibility into AWS and Azure costs using consolidated dashboards.
- Retail Chain: Used Embee Software’s tagging and governance framework to allocate spend by department, improving accountability.
These success stories underline how cloud cost control is not just about reducing expenses but driving value and enabling innovation.
Conclusion
As organizations continue to expand their cloud footprint, multi-cloud cost management becomes both a challenge and an opportunity. Without proper governance, cloud bills can spiral out of control. But with FinOps best practices, businesses can transform cloud costs into a competitive advantage.
We empower enterprises to take control of their cloud spend with proven cloud financial management strategies, robust Azure FinOps frameworks, and automation-first solutions.
