Rising Cloud Costs: Regain Control With FinOps Platform

When organizations embark on the journey to the cloud, one of the most attractive promises is cost reduction. Cloud migration is often framed as a financial panacea, a way to eliminate hefty upfront hardware investments and free up resources to focus on innovation and growth. Yet, for many businesses, the post-migration reality is anything but a reduction in IT spend—instead, they find themselves grappling with ever-increasing cloud bills, elusive visibility into usage, and a frustrating loss of control. In fact, a Flexera State of Cloud Report (2023) underlines that managing cloud spending has now superseded security as the top concern for enterprises using cloud services.

For customers lured by the appeal of predictable, reduced IT costs, encountering unexpectedly high or fluctuating cloud invoices is more than just a disappointment—it’s a risk to operational budgets and sometimes even business viability. So why does this happen? More importantly, what can businesses—and particularly service providers—do to regain control, restore predictability, and unlock the value the cloud was supposed to deliver?

Cloud overspending isn’t a fluke or a failure of technology; it’s often the result of a combination of complex factors. To regain control, organizations must first understand what’s pushing cloud costs up in the first place.

1. Lack of Visibility Into Cloud Costs

One of the most significant culprits behind rising cloud costs is a persistent lack of visibility throughout the cloud journey—starting as early as the migration phase. Migration is rarely a simple lift-and-shift exercise; it involves inventorying applications, mapping dependencies, untangling on-prem license agreements, and estimating what will be needed in the cloud environment. This complexity is compounded when organizations have legacy contracts, multiple environments, or hybrid set-ups.

Without real-time, granular insight into consumption during migration, teams are essentially flying blind. Estimating cloud resources based on on-premise usage rarely produces accurate forecasts, leading to surprising and often substantial over-provisioning. When organizations lack tools that compare current vs. projected usage and cost with precision, they frequently err on the side of caution—which, in cloud terms, means over-purchasing.

2. Siloed Cost Management Responsibility

Staying within budget requires clear ownership—but all too often, cost management responsibilities are spread too thin or left undisciplined across an organization. In older, centralized IT models, a single department might manage all technology expenditures. But the cloud, by design, enables decentralization and autonomy: business units, project teams, and even developers can spin up resources at will. When responsibility for those costs remains ambiguous, inefficient resource utilization becomes rampant. Departments blame each other, costs spiral, and there’s no single source of truth to enforce accountability.

This lack of clarity is especially problematic in companies with hybrid or multi-cloud environments, where centralized cost management tools—or traditional models such as Microsoft’s Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA)—fall short of providing the oversight needed.

3. Underused or Forgotten Provider Discounts

Many cloud providers offer substantial discounts in exchange for commitments, such as reserved instances (for virtual machines reserved in advance for long-term use) or volume-based discounts. These cost-saving opportunities can cut cloud expenditures significantly—but only if organizations are aware of them and manage them proactively.

Unfortunately, the complexity of modern cloud estates, sprawling across regions, subscriptions, and even providers, often results in these discounts being overlooked. When teams aren’t aligned, or visibility isn’t granular, businesses can end up using more expensive pay-as-you-go resources—even when eligible for something less costly.

4. Cloud Waste and Orphaned Resources

The pay-as-you-go model, while flexible and scalable, can also lead to unintended resource sprawl. It’s common for organizations to leave “orphaned” resources running—virtual machines spun up for a project and never decommissioned, disks unattached to any running instance, or storage buckets left long after their purpose ends. Each of these forgotten resources racks up charges, silently inflating the monthly bill. Without active monitoring and automated clean-up, cloud waste can easily go undetected.

5. Unoptimized Resource Sizing

It’s natural to err on the side of caution when allocating resources, especially during or after cloud migration. However, what begins as a temporary over-provisioning “just to be safe” often becomes permanent bloat. Businesses might allocate larger virtual machines or more storage than necessary, never revisiting sizing as workloads stabilize or requirements change. Over time, this practice leads to chronic overspending, one instance at a time.

Gaining back control of cloud costs requires a new approach—one flexible, collaborative, and cost-conscious by design. Enter FinOps, a blend of Finance and DevOps, which fuses financial management, operations, and engineering into a single discipline focused on maximizing value from cloud investments.

What Is FinOps?

FinOps is a cultural and operational practice that encourages cross-functional collaboration to manage and optimize cloud spending. It relies on shared responsibility, real-time data, and iterative improvement—ensuring that every stakeholder, from finance to engineering, is involved in the journey towards cost optimization. For service providers, adopting a FinOps approach means gaining:

• Real-Time Visibility: Access to current consumption and expenditure data at every level—by customer, business unit, application, or even individual user.
• Collaborative Accountability: Clearly assigned ownership and responsibility for cloud resources and their costs.
• Continuous Optimization: Processes and tools for finding, reporting, and acting on cost-saving opportunities, including automated recommendations.
• Actionable Insights: Ability to analyze trends, forecast future costs, and track the impact of optimization initiatives.

How FinOps Addresses Cost Rising Challenges

• Visibility From the Start: By embedding FinOps from the first stages of migration, service providers gain live insight into resource usage and cost projections. This enables accurate budgeting and the ability to catch overspending before it becomes a problem.
• Clear Responsibility: FinOps platforms allow costs to be mapped to specific users, teams, or customers, introducing accountability and discouraging wasteful behavior.
• Making the Most of Discounts: A FinOps framework regularly surfaces opportunities for savings, from identifying underutilized reserved instances to surfacing provider volume discounts that might otherwise be missed.

To translate FinOps from best practice into a daily routine, organizations need technology platforms built for transparency and action. The Octopus FinOps Platform is just that: a robust, centralized solution designed to help service providers—and, by extension, their customers—regain command of cloud spending.

The Key Advantages of Octopus FinOps

1. Unified, Real-Time Dashboards

Octopus unifies data from across clouds, accounts, and business units, turning a sprawl of opaque invoices into actionable insights. Real-time dashboards deliver an at-a-glance understanding of current spend—by service, team, project, or customer—enabling faster, smarter budgeting and optimization.

2. Granular Cost Allocation and Tagging

With the Octopus FinOps platform, service providers can automatically tag and allocate all cloud resources at a granular level. This allows for precise attribution of costs, making it easy to see who owns which resource, where the money is going, and where savings can be found.

3. Automated Cost Optimization

The platform uses intelligent algorithms to detect and flag idle resources, overprovisioned assets, and missed commitment opportunities. Service providers can take action immediately or schedule automated clean-up routines—helping to tackle waste without manual intervention.

4. Proactive Use of Provider Discounts

Octopus regularly audits cloud usage against available provider discounts and recommends actions to capitalize on them—whether that means committing to reserved instances or targeting new volume thresholds.

5. Streamlined Reporting and Forecasting

Octopus enables one-click generation of reports for finance teams, operational managers, and customers themselves. It also provides forecasting and trend analysis capabilities, helping providers plan and proactively manage costs for future growth or seasonal fluctuations.

6. Integration With SLAs and Customer Billing

Service providers can link Octopus FinOps data directly with customer service level agreements and billing systems. This ensures that billing is always accurate, transparent, and aligned with actual resource usage—minimizing disputes and enhancing client trust.

Let’s consider two examples of how a FinOps platform transforms cloud management.

• Scenario 1: Optimizing Multi-Cloud Spend for an MSP

A managed services provider (MSP) supporting dozens of clients across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud migrates to Octopus FinOps. The unified dashboard quickly reveals duplicative resources across clouds—such as identical backup servers in both AWS and Azure left running after a project concluded. Automated clean-up and cross-provider discount recommendations reduce the MSP’s cloud spend by 20% in three months.

• Scenario 2: Visibility in Hybrid Environments for Enterprise IT

A global enterprise with a hybrid infrastructure leverages Octopus to track resource usage in data centers and the cloud. By tagging workloads and assigning spend to specific business units, the IT finance team can charge back resources appropriately and identify where to optimize. They switch some legacy workloads to reserved instances and claim volume discounts, saving hundreds of thousands annually.

The promise of the cloud is agility, scalability, and cost efficiency. Yet, without the right approach, it’s easy for cloud costs to spiral—leaving service providers and their customers frustrated, over budget, and searching for answers. Embrace platforms like Octopus FinOps to regain control.