FinOps Is Finance Ops: Why Your FinanceTeam Can’t Afford to Sit Out

Part 1: The Cultural Shift No One Can Ignore

By Lou Perugini | CloudTechCFO.com

Why This Feels Uncomfortable

For decades, finance and engineering lived in parallel but separate worlds. Finance managed

budgets, forecasts, and capital planning. Engineers focused on performance, uptime, and building

features.

Out of control cloud spend can only be tacked if you collapse that divide. What we need is for:

•  Engineers see the dollar impact of their architecture decisions.

•  Finance analysts must learn the language of cloud and IT—a foreign vocabulary of instances, clusters, tagging, and usage metrics.

  
  

This shift is not comfortable. Engineers often don’t want to think about money. Finance often

doesn’t want to think about technology. But in the cloud era, both groups must learn just enough

of each other’s discipline to collaborate.

This blurring of lines isn’t optional. It’s the only way to prevent uncontrolled cloud spend and to

unlock the true value of cloud investments.

Why Finance Can’t Sit Out

In many organizations, early cloud adoption was left to IT or engineering alone. The result:

•  Cloud bills spiraled without clear accountability.

•  Business cases promised savings that never materialized.

•  Finance was brought in only after the fact, to explain overruns.

  
  

That reactive model is broken. Cloud spend is too material to leave to IT alone, and the pace of

decision-making is too fast for old governance processes.

CFOs and finance teams need to be in the room early—not to police spending, but to partner in

creating a sustainable model. FinOps is the discipline that makes this partnership possible.

The Blurring of Roles: A Necessary Evolution

Think of FinOps as a team sport:

•  Engineers remain responsible for building performant, reliable systems.

•  Finance ensures discipline, budget alignment, and strategic clarity.

•  The FinOps function acts as the translator and coach, bringing data, visibility, and

practices that allow everyone to play their role effectively.

In this world:

•  Finance learns to speak cloud fluently enough to question assumptions and guide

decisions.

•  Engineers gain financial literacy to weigh tradeoffs between cost, performance, and

speed.

It’s a two-way education. And it requires humility on both sides.

Behavioral Change at Scale

FinOps is not a toolset—it’s a culture change. That’s why it feels so different from traditional

financial processes.

•  Forecasting: Traditional costs like rent or payroll move predictably. Cloud costs don’t.

They expand or contract daily based on usage, demand, and revenue. Forecasting cloud

spend will always be more fluid than forecasting fixed expenses. Finance teams must

adapt.

•  Guardrails, Not Roadblocks: Instead of approving every request like in the old CAPEX

model, finance leaders set budgets and policies, then empower engineering teams to

operate within them. Guardrails replace gates.

•  Distributed Accountability: FinOps cannot be done by one central team alone. Each

product or DevOps team must own its portion of spend. The central FinOps team

provides visibility, benchmarks, and education, but the day-to-day tradeoffs happen at the

edge.

This requires more than spreadsheets. It requires change management: communicating why the

model is shifting, showing teams how they’ll benefit, and rewarding the right behaviors.

The Role of Executive Sponsorship

No cultural change of this magnitude sticks without executive air cover. A successful FinOps

transformation requires:

•  A senior sponsor—often the CFO or CIO—who champions the cause.

•  A message that this is not just an IT initiative, but a company-wide shift.

•  Incentives and recognition that encourage adoption, not just compliance.

  
  

I’ve seen companies gamify cost savings, run internal challenges, and celebrate teams who find

creative ways to cut waste. These are not gimmicks—they’re tools to drive lasting behavior

change.

Why This Matters Now

Cloud spend is becoming one of the largest line items in the enterprise P&L. That spend is also

one of the most flexible and reversible—if governed properly.

Finance can no longer stand on the sidelines. The uncomfortable blurring of finance and

engineering is not a passing phase—it’s the new normal.

In Part 2, I’ll share what the central FinOps team should focus on: the mechanics of visibility,

rate optimization, tagging, policies, and education. Together, these disciplines create a

framework where finance and engineering can collaborate effectively, each doing their part to

maximize value.