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

Part 2: The FinOps Playbook for the Central Team

By Lou Perugini | CloudTechCFO.com

From Culture to Practice

In Part 1, I covered why FinOps is as much about culture as it is about tools: the uncomfortable

blurring of finance and engineering, the need for executive sponsorship, and the distributed

accountability that keeps cloud spend under control.

But culture alone won’t make cloud cost-efficient. Companies also need a central FinOps

function—a team that builds the scaffolding, policies, and visibility that let engineering and

finance teams work together effectively.

Think of the central FinOps team as architects, educators, and coaches. They don’t “do”

FinOps on behalf of others. They create the environment that allows everyone else to do it well.

The Traffic Circle, Not the Traffic Cop

A useful way to understand FinOps is to think about how traffic flows.

At a four-way intersection with a traffic cop, every driver waits for permission. It’s orderly, but

it’s slow. That’s the old IT model: every spend request passed through centralized approval,

stalling innovation.

FinOps works more like a traffic circle. Everyone knows the rules, but each driver is responsible

for making smart decisions in real time. There’s no cop in the middle holding things up. Traffic

flows faster, with guardrails that prevent chaos.

The central FinOps team designs the circle. They establish the common rules and guardrails, but

it’s up to engineers, product teams, and finance partners to navigate their way through.

The Five Core Roles of the Central FinOps Team

1. Provide Cost Visibility Across the Enterprise

The most important job of the central team is to make cloud spend transparent. If

engineers and product owners can’t see their consumption, they can’t control it.

This means:

• Designing a tagging and account structure that matches the company’s org model.

• Standardizing reporting down to the workload or revenue stream.

• Making cost data as real-time and self-serve as possible.

Visibility is the foundation. Without it, FinOps doesn’t work.

2. Centralize Commitments and Optimize Rates

Engineers are best positioned to optimize efficiency in their workloads. But lowering

unit rates—through enterprise discounting, reserved capacity, and private pricing

agreements—is best managed centrally.

The FinOps team should:

• Negotiate enterprise agreements with cloud providers.

• Manage savings plans, reserved instances, and discount programs.

• Right-size commitments to match demand forecasts.

This balance is key: engineers reduce waste, while the central team reduces rates.

Together, they bend the cost curve.

3. Design Guardrails, Not Gates

Cloud doesn’t come with built-in governance. The FinOps team needs to put the structure

in place:

• Tagging schemas that support reporting and accountability.

• Account hierarchy strategies that balance autonomy with control.

• Policies for budget thresholds, alerts, and exceptions.

The point is to let teams move quickly within safe boundaries. Guardrails keep traffic

flowing. Gates and bottlenecks stop it.

4. Educate, Evangelize, and Enable

The central team is also the translator between finance and engineering. They:

• Teach engineers how their architecture decisions affect cost.

• Help finance learn the basics of cloud services and pricing models.

• Share best practices and benchmarks across teams.

• Run playbooks, workshops, and sometimes gamification programs to keep cost

awareness high.

Education is not a one-time event. It’s a continuous function that reinforces shared

ownership.

5. Serve as Advisors and Early Warning System

The central team doesn’t just report spend. They actively recommend optimizations and

flag risks.

• Advising DevOps teams on cost-effective architectures.

• Highlighting when a project is running too far ahead of budget.

• Suggesting design changes or alternate services that could improve efficiency.

They are thought leaders in cost optimization, not just accountants tallying bills.

A Multi-Disciplinary Function

A healthy FinOps team is not just finance people or just engineers. It’s multi-disciplinary by

design:

•  A DevOps engineer who understands architecture tradeoffs.

•  A data analyst who can build models, forecasts, and reports.

•  A finance analyst who ties spend to budgets and strategy.

•  An evangelist or change management leader who drives adoption and cultural shift.

• 
  

This blend allows the team to act as a bridge across silos, rather than another silo themselves.

What the Central Team Doesn’t Do

It’s just as important to clarify what the central FinOps team doesn’t do. They are not:

•  A cost-policing function.

•  The sole owners of optimization.

•  The team that approves or denies every spend decision.

• 
  

FinOps is distributed by design. Product and engineering teams are where tradeoffs happen. The

central team’s role is to make those tradeoffs visible, measurable, and aligned with enterprise

strategy.

The CFO’s Perspective

For finance leaders, the central FinOps team is a strategic ally. They deliver the visibility and

controls that let CFOs answer key questions with confidence:

•  Where is our cloud money going, and why?

•  Are we getting a return on incremental spend?

•  What is the opportunity cost of capital tied up in inefficient workloads?

•  How much innovation could we fund if we optimized further?

  
  

By partnering with a strong FinOps function, CFOs can move from reactive cost explanations to

proactive capital allocation.

Closing: From Ops to Advantage

Cloud spend will continue to grow. Left unmanaged, it will erode margins and credibility. But

with a strong central FinOps team, backed by executive sponsorship and cultural adoption, it

becomes something much more powerful: a lever for agility, innovation, and growth.

Finance cannot afford to sit this out. FinOps isn’t just IT ops. It’s finance ops. And it’s here to

stay.

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