You might have heard people talking about FinOps 2.0 lately. While it’s not an official release by the FinOps Foundation, it’s how community members describe the next stage of FinOps maturity.
Cloud computing isn’t what it used to be. Companies can now run multi-cloud environments, integrate AI, automate workloads, and track sustainability goals. Managing cloud expenses is no longer just about cutting expenses—it’s about spending smart and ensuring every cloud dollar drives business value. That’s where the idea of FinOps 2.0 comes in.
A Quick Recap: What Was FinOps Before 2.0?
FinOps (short for Financial Operations) was created to help companies track, manage, and optimize cloud spending. Before the major refinements in 2024, what we now call FinOps 1.0 primarily focused on three core principles:
- Visibility – Providing transparency into cloud expenses so businesses know exactly where their money is going.
- Optimization – Identifying wasteful spending and right-sizing cloud resources to reduce unnecessary expenses.
- Accountability – Ensuring teams were responsible for their cloud budgets and spending decisions.
While these FinOps principles helped control costs, the framework heavily focused on cost-cutting.
What’s Different in FinOps 2.0?
With the 2024 changes, the FinOps framework has been revised from simple cost tracking to a more value-driven approach, ensuring you get the maximum return on your cloud investments rather than just minimizing expenses.¹ Let’s take a closer look at what changed with FinOps 2.0:
A More Structured and Simplified Framework
The framework in FinOps 1.0 was complex because it covered many overlapping areas without a clear organizational structure. It’s not uncommon to struggle with where to focus your efforts and how different FinOps practices fit together strategically.
To simplify the framework, FinOps 2.0 now revolves around four fundamental business outcomes:
- Understand → Gain complete visibility into cloud usage and costs, ensuring organizations know exactly where money is spent and why.
- Quantify → Measure the business value of cloud budgeting, ensuring investments align with strategic goals rather than just reducing costs.
- Optimize → Continuously refine cloud efficiency, eliminating waste and ensuring the best use of cloud resources.
- Manage → Oversee the FinOps workflow with governance, accountability, and automation, ensuring long-term success.
Expansion Beyond Public Cloud
In the past, FinOps was mainly about managing costs in public cloud platforms like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. But today, companies spend money on many other cloud-related services, including SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) subscriptions, on-premises private cloud setups, and hybrid cloud environments.
To address this, FinOps 2.0 introduces FinOps Scopes, which recognizes that cloud financial management extends beyond just public cloud providers. Now, FinOps can be applied to a broader range of technology expenses.
Multi-Cloud Cost Tracking
If you use multiple cloud providers (like AWS for databases and Google Cloud for AI models), you probably know how frustrating it is to keep track of different billing systems. Each provider presents cloud billing and cost data differently, making it hard to see what’s happening.
To fix this, FinOps 2.0 introduces FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification).
FOCUS is a new standard for cloud expense data, ensuring all cloud expenses are formatted similarly. This makes tracking, comparing, and analyzing cloud spending easier across multiple providers. And most FinOps tool vendors have adopted it.²
More Defined Roles
One major issue with FinOps 1.0 was that users weren’t sure who should be responsible for managing cloud expenses. With 2.0, the framework introduces more precise role definitions, categorizing people into two groups:
A. Core Personas: The primary team members who manage FinOps daily, such as:
- Finance teams (responsible for tracking costs and setting budgets)
- Engineers & DevOps (responsible for optimizing cloud resources)
- FinOps specialists (accountable for driving the process)
B. Allied Personas: People who indirectly contribute, such as:
- Executives (decision-making)
- Security teams (ensuring compliance)
- Procurement teams (negotiating contracts)
This new structure ensures that FinOps isn’t just an IT or finance problem—it’s a company-wide effort.
AI & Automation
Another key change in 2.0 is the increased focus on automation.
Many cloud cost management tasks—such as budget tracking, anomaly detection, and optimization recommendations—used to be done manually. Now, FinOps 2.0 encourages the use of AI and automation tools to:
- Detect cost spikes and anomalies automatically
- Predict future cloud expenses using AI-powered analytics
- Automatically adjust cloud resources based on demand
This makes FinOps adoption faster, more efficient, and less prone to errors.
How to Build a FinOps Culture for Better Business Outcomes
A FinOps culture is when everyone in a company works together to achieve common FinOps goals—and it’s crucial for a successful FinOps implementation.
Just as they updated the first framework, the Foundation also refined its guidance on establishing, managing, and scaling a strong culture. Here’s how:
1. Define What FinOps Means for Your Organization
Every company has a unique way of running FinOps, and there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. Some organizations have a dedicated FinOps team, while others embed experts into existing finance and engineering departments. Some treat FinOps as part of a Cloud Center of Excellence, while others call it a Cloud Business Office.
Regardless of how it’s structured, a FinOps team aims to enable, support, and improve how cloud FinOps works across the company. The first step in building a thriving culture is to define what FinOps looks like in your company and set clear expectations for the teams involved.
2. Assign a FinOps Team with Clear Responsibilities
To integrate FinOps into daily operations, you need a team that owns the process. This team may start small, but it should include representatives from finance, engineering, and leadership who work together to improve cloud cost visibility, decision-making, and accountability.
FinOps Leaders or Drivers often lead this team, guide the strategy, encourage collaboration, and provide governance. As the company matures in FinOps, this team will adapt and scale based on cloud usage and organizational complexity.
3. Encourage Cross-Team Collaboration
FinOps isn’t just about tracking costs—it’s about collaborating across departments to ensure cloud budgets align with business goals. If finance, engineering, and product teams don’t communicate, costs spiral out of control.
To create a FinOps culture, you need transparent decision-making processes, accountability structures, and transparency in expense control. Here’s how to make that happen:
- Establish regular meetings where finance, engineering, and leadership review cloud expenses.
- Implement cost transparency dashboards so teams know precisely what they’re spending.
- Define who has the authority to approve or optimize cloud costs—so decisions aren’t delayed by confusion.
4. Make Cloud Cost Data Easy to Access and Understand
A major challenge in cloud expense control is that teams don’t always have the correct data at the right time. If engineering teams don’t see cost data in real-time, they won’t know when they’re overspending. If finance teams don’t understand why cloud expenses fluctuate, they’ll struggle to forecast budgets.
To simplify cost management, you need to improve cost visibility for finance teams and anyone who makes cloud spending decisions.
5. Build a Strong FinOps Leadership Structure
For FinOps to succeed, it needs strong leadership backing. FinOps leadership may fall under the CIO, CFO, or CTO, depending on the organization. However, no matter who leads it, they must actively promote FinOps culture across the company.
6. Embrace Continuous Improvement
Building a FinOps culture isn’t an overnight process. The foundation provides FinOps phases to help you scale your workflows as your organization grows:³
The Crawl Phase (When You’re Just Getting Started)
At this stage, companies are just starting with FinOps and may have basic cost tracking in place. The focus is on understanding cloud costs, setting up a FinOps team, and defining roles.
The Walk Phase (More Structured FinOps Processes)
As FinOps matures, more people across the company get involved, and processes become more structured. At this stage, organizations begin using automation, cost-allocation strategies, and cross-team collaboration.
The Run Phase (FinOps Becomes Fully Embedded in Company Culture)
At this stage, FinOps is part of how the company operates daily. Teams use automated cost optimization, advanced budgeting techniques, and predictive analytics to maximize cloud efficiency.
The key is to identify where your company currently stands and use the Crawl-Walk-Run model as a roadmap for growth. As you mature, gradually introduce more automation, forecasting, and collaboration to strengthen your FinOps practice.
Tired of cloud expenses clouding your business goals? Let C4 Technical Services help!
If you’re spending more but getting less value, it’s time to rethink your approach. At C4 Technical Services, we help businesses cut through the noise and make smarter cloud decisions with FinOps strategies that work. One of our clients, a healthcare insurance company, saved $6.9 million just by optimizing their cloud FinOps—and you can too.
If you’re ready to take control of your cloud spending, let’s talk. We’ll help you optimize costs, improve forecasting, and make sure every dollar is well spent. Get in touch today to start a conversation about how we can help.
References:
- “Key 2024 Changes to the FinOps Framework” FinOps Foundation, 21 March 2024, www.finops.org/insights/2024-finops-framework/.
- “FinOps Tool Vendors Adopt FOCUS” FinOps Foundation, 28 Aug. 2024, www.finops.org/insights/finops-vendors-adopt-focus/.
- “FinOps Practice Operations” FinOps Foundation, Accessed 7 March 2025, www.finops.org/framework/capabilities/finops-practice-operations/.
