Discovering Azure

The middle of the year is a very good moment for every company to stop for a second and take a closer look at its spending. Are we still moving in the right direction? Are our costs under control? Or maybe our cloud environment has become too expensive and requires optimization?

These are questions that sooner or later every management team will ask.

In mature organizations, cloud spending is monitored continuously and optimization is treated as an ongoing process. In companies that are still developing their cloud strategy, however, such reflections often appear around the middle of the fiscal year — when budgets, forecasts, and operational costs start becoming more visible.

Cloud providers frequently advertise cloud computing as a cheaper alternative to traditional on-premises infrastructure. In many situations this is absolutely true. However, cloud does not automatically guarantee savings. Without proper governance and cost control, cloud environments can quickly become expensive and difficult to manage.

Very often cloud environments become cluttered with unused or forgotten resources:

• virtual machines that are no longer needed,
• unattached disks,
• unused public IP addresses,
• oversized resources,
• old snapshots,
• inactive development environments running 24/7,
• forgotten test deployments.

All of these generate unnecessary costs every single day.

The good news is that this situation can be prevented.

This article opens a new series dedicated to FinOps — a topic that has become extremely popular in recent years because organizations everywhere are looking for ways to optimize costs while still enabling innovation and growth.

Throughout this series, I will explain the foundations of FinOps and provide practical, real-world examples of how to better manage the financial side of cloud environments. All examples and optimization scenarios will be based on Microsoft Azure environments, focusing on tools, governance models, automation, and operational best practices that can help organizations reduce unnecessary spending and improve cloud efficiency.

So let’s start from the beginning.

What is FinOps?

FinOps stands for Financial Operations. It is a cloud financial management practice that helps organizations better understand and control cloud spending while enabling teams to move fast and innovate responsibly.

FinOps is not only about reducing costs. It is about creating a culture of financial accountability in the cloud, where engineering, operations, finance, and business teams work together to make smarter decisions.

The term and methodology became popular thanks to the FinOps Foundation.

The FinOps Foundation is a global non-profit organization focused on promoting cloud financial management best practices. It was founded in 2019 and is now part of the Linux Foundation. Today, the organization brings together thousands of professionals and hundreds of companies worldwide that share knowledge, standards, and practical approaches related to cloud cost optimization and operational efficiency.

The foundation created the well-known FinOps Framework, which has become the industry standard for cloud financial management.

What is the FinOps Framework?

The FinOps Framework is a structured operating model that helps organizations manage cloud spending in a collaborative and measurable way. Instead of treating cloud costs as purely a finance problem or purely a technical problem, the framework connects:

• engineering teams,
• operations teams,
• finance departments,
• procurement teams,
• and business stakeholders.

The framework is built around three main phases:

Inform

Understanding cloud spending through visibility, allocation, tagging, reporting, and analytics.

At this stage organizations focus on:

• identifying where money is spent,
• improving cost visibility,
• creating dashboards and reports,
• implementing tagging strategies,
• assigning ownership to resources and workloads.

Without visibility, optimization is impossible.

Optimize

Identifying opportunities to reduce waste and improve efficiency.

This phase usually includes:

• rightsizing virtual machines,
• removing unused resources,
• implementing reservations and savings plans,
• storage optimization,
• automation,
• improving architecture efficiency,
• reducing idle or overprovisioned infrastructure.

This is the phase most people initially associate with FinOps because it directly impacts cloud bills.

Operate

Creating long-term operational processes and governance.

This phase focuses on:

• continuous optimization,
• governance policies,
• accountability,
• budgeting and forecasting,
• automation,
• operational maturity,
• integrating FinOps into daily operations.

At this level, FinOps becomes part of company culture rather than a one-time optimization project.

Crawl, Walk, Run — FinOps maturity journey

One of the most important concepts in FinOps is understanding that cloud financial management maturity does not happen overnight.

The FinOps Foundation often describes this journey using the Crawl, Walk, Run maturity model.

Crawl

This is the beginning stage.

Organizations usually:

• have limited visibility into cloud costs,
• lack proper tagging,
• react to invoices instead of proactively managing costs,
• have little collaboration between IT and finance,
• perform manual reporting.

At this stage the main goal is simply understanding:

• what exists,
• who owns it,
• and where money is being spent.

Many companies start their FinOps journey here.

Walk

At the Walk stage organizations become more mature and structured.

Typically they:

• implement governance,
• standardize tagging,
• automate reporting,
• introduce budgets and alerts,
• use recommendations from tools like Azure Advisor,
• improve accountability between teams.

Cloud costs become actively monitored rather than reviewed only after invoices arrive.

Organizations also begin integrating FinOps into operational processes and engineering decisions.

Run

This is the advanced maturity stage.

At this level organizations:

• fully integrate FinOps into engineering and business processes,
• automate optimization activities,
• use forecasting and predictive analytics,
• continuously optimize architecture,
• measure business value versus cloud spend,
• make cost optimization part of software delivery and operations.

FinOps at the Run stage is no longer only about reducing costs — it becomes a strategic business capability.

Why FinOps matters more than ever

Today, organizations are under constant pressure to optimize spending while still maintaining innovation, flexibility, and operational efficiency. As cloud environments continue to grow, managing costs becomes not only a financial challenge, but also an operational and strategic one.

This is exactly where FinOps becomes essential.

FinOps helps companies build better visibility into their cloud environments, improve collaboration between technical and business teams, and create a culture of accountability around cloud usage and spending. Instead of treating cloud costs as a problem to solve once a year, organizations begin managing them continuously as part of their daily operations.

Ultimately, FinOps is not about limiting innovation or reducing cloud adoption. It is about making smarter decisions, improving efficiency, and ensuring that cloud investments truly deliver business value.

What will this series cover?

In the next articles, we will focus on practical Azure-based FinOps scenarios, including:

• Azure Cost Management,
• tagging and governance strategies,
• Azure Advisor recommendations,
• rightsizing virtual machines,
• Reservations and Savings Plans,
• monitoring unused resources,
• storage optimization,
• automation opportunities,
• dashboards and reporting,
• Azure Policy,
• and operational best practices.

The goal of this series is not only to explain FinOps theory, but also to show practical examples that can help improve real cloud environments.

Because successful cloud adoption is not only about deploying resources quickly — it is also about using them responsibly, efficiently, and sustainably.