Why your organization needs a FinOps strategy—and an MSP to implement it

Today’s organizations have turned to cloud computing to achieve speed and scale as they innovate.

But as cloud adoption surges, costs and wasted resources often skyrocket without proper oversight. Organizations may run workloads in the cloud that could run more cost-effectively elsewhere, or they may lose track of workloads—amounting to a waste of cloud spending.

Indeed, some 94% of respondents to a recent survey said that some of their public cloud spending is wasted, and almost a third (31%) estimated that this waste exceeds 50%. Further according to Flexera’s “State of the Cloud” report, 84% of respondents are struggling with cloud costs. As organizations move forward in 2026, they need to get more disciplined about cloud costs to get the most out of their cloud architecture.

 “FinOps provides a more proactive, data-driven approach for cost projections and capacity planning… enabling enterprises to readily adapt to changing business needs and cloud usage patterns,” who was at the time area vice president for Greater China, ASEAN and Korea at NetApp, in “Why FinOps matters.”

That’s why FinOps adoption grew by 46% in 2025 as cost governance became a board-level priority.

What is FinOps?

FinOps–short for financial operations–is an operational framework that unites engineering, finance, and business teams to maximize business value from cloud investments by fostering collaboration, data-driven decisions, and financial accountability for cloud spending. When finance and engineering, and business join forces to apply best practices to cloud costs, organizations move beyond simple cost-cutting to strategic optimization and value realization.

Smaller companies may think FinOps isn’t for them—that their cloud investments are too small to warrant optimization, smaller business may stand to gain the most from FinOps:

“FinOps isn’t about how much you spend—it’s about how much you waste,” noted the LinkedIn article “FinOps: The Game-Changer SMEs Didn’t Know They Needed.” SMEs often lose a larger percentage of their cloud budget to inefficiencies than enterprises do—simply because they lack visibility and processes.”

Cloud challenges that a FinOps strategy and an MSP can solve

Cloud costs and poor visibility into those costs can be show-stoppers. For organizations to be able to Today’s organizations have turned to cloud computing to achieve speed and scale as they innovate.

But as cloud adoption surges, costs can easily skyrocket, particularly when organizations neglect spending oversight. Organizations may run cloud-based applications that could be run more cost-effectively on-site. Or companies may lose track of resources in the cloud—amounting to a waste of cloud spending.

Indeed, some 94% of respondents to a recent survey said that some of their public cloud spending is wasted. And almost a third (31%) estimated that this waste exceeds 50%. Further, according to Flexera’s “State of the Cloud” report, 84% of respondents are struggling with cloud costs. As organizations move forward in 2026, they’ll need to get more disciplined about cloud costs to get return on investment.

“Understanding FinOps is essential for any business using cloud services,” said Brad Giddens, Integris director of sales, financial institutions. “Organizations using FinOps can take a proactive, data‑driven approach to forecasting expenses and planning capacity rather than reacting to unpredictable monthly cloud costs. FinOps empowers organizations to adapt more effectively to shifting business demands and evolving cloud usage patterns.”

That’s probably why FinOps adoption grew by 46% in 2025 as cost governance became a board-level priority.

What is FinOps?

FinOps helps IT and finance finally speak the same language so there are no billing surprises. The  framework unites engineering, finance, and business teams to maximize business value from cloud investment and assign accountability for spending. With FinOps, organizations move beyond simple cost-cutting to strategic optimization and value realization in the cloud.

t’s the framework that helps IT and Finance finally speak the same language so there are no surprises on the monthly bill.”

Smaller companies may believe that FinOps isn’t for them—that their cloud investments are too small to warrant optimization. But, in fact, smaller business may stand to gain the most from FinOps.

“FinOps isn’t about how much you spend—it’s about how much you waste,” noted the author of “FinOps: The Game-Changer SMEs Didn’t Know They Needed.” SMBs often lose a larger percentage of their cloud budget to inefficiencies than enterprises do—simply because they lack visibility and processes.”

Cloud challenges that a FinOps strategy—and an MSP—can solve

For organizations to be able to justify their cloud spending, they need better visibility into that spending—and cloud resource use. Consider the business benefits FinOps can bring your business, such as these:

• Resource waste and unpredictable spending. The principal challenge of undisciplined, unmonitored cloud computing is waste. Without oversight, organizations have no way of knowing whether cloud allocations are inflating costs and creating cloud sprawl. FinOps practices provide insight into overprovisioned or unused resources that call for right-sizing or shutting down servers.

• Cloud sprawl. As organizations move assets to the cloud, it often triggers sprawl, where an organization’s applications, servers, and other resources are poorly managed or totally unaccounted for. FinOps prevents uncontrolled growth of cloud resources by providing clear tracking.
• Obscured costs. FinOps releases organizations from the other side of waste: lack of cost visibility. FinOps offers granular visibility into who spends what, where, and why—overcoming complex pricing models.
• Lack of infrastructure ownership. As cloud use and cloud sprawl expand, cloud-based resources may lack a clear owner given employee turnover, team changes, or simple lack of oversight of cloud-based resources. FinOps drives accountability, making engineering teams—and others—responsible for usage and optimizations. 

How MSPs can deliver FinOps strategy

An MSP that understands FinOps strategies will have expertise in cloud cost optimization. The right partner can help architect cloud infrastructure to prevent waste and optimize cloud performance and spending. MSPs do so by developing tracking systems to provide visibility into cloud spending. And redirect cloud allocation to reduce waste, boost performance, and curb cloud spending.

 “Not using FinOps software enough to be the eyes and ears of wasted and unused [cloud resources] is something that a lot of companies” are doing,” said IDC Research Director Robert Tiffany in the article “31% of IT leaders waste half their cloud spend,” by Evan Schuman.

Here’s how MSPs can make a difference with FinOps:

Cost visibility and reporting. MSPs implement tools and processes that help clients see where their cloud money is going. Cost transparency and tracking is critical to FinOps success.

This usually includes the following:

• Creating unified dashboards among public clouds, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and software-as-a-service-delivered applications.
• Allocating costs at the business unit or project level
• Creating continual review and monitoring
• Developing monthly or quarterly executive summaries

Cloud optimization and cost-reduction execution. MSPs are well positioned to right-size workloads, optimize storage in public computing, and eliminate wasted resources. They can also develop tiered architecture to ensure the most cost-effective storage architecture without sacrificing data usefulness. Here are key tasks in cloud optimization:

• Right-sizing compute and storage
• evaluating where workloads should reside—whether in public or private clouds—and reallocating as needed
• eliminating idle resources
• tiering storage and implementing lifecycle management
• license optimization (Microsoft 365, software as a service, etc.)

Budgeting, forecasting, and financial governance. MSPs help track and forecast budget allocation, identify spikes in spending, and establish spending limits and accountability, including tasks such as

• budget creation and tracking
• forecast modeling
• alerts for anomalies or spend spikes
• spend guardrails tied to business goals

Tooling and automation management. Instead of having clients buy and implement a patchwork of tools, MSPs bring integrated tools with various capabilities:

• cloud cost management platforms
• automation for idle resource shutdown
• alerting and anomaly detection systems
• invoice reconciliation tools

Why MSPs may be best positioned to help implement FinOps

Ultimately, MSPs are strong candidates to help shepherd successful FinOps programs, yielding cost reduction and cloud resource optimization. Organizations, particularly smaller ones, may lack the capacity to build these capabilities in-house.

But MSPs can introduce these capabilities without overhead or internal burden. They can establish an operating model that embeds financial accountability into everyday cloud decisions, ensuring performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.

“The rapid rise of FinOps should be seen as a bountiful opportunity for MSPs, as the core concepts make FinOps the ideal program for MSPs to drive,” said Ben McGahon, founder and CEO of Kalibr8, a FinOps platform provider, in “FinOps-as-a-Service Will Be a Massive Threat or Opportunity for MSPs.”

As cloud environments grow more complex in 2026, organizations can no longer afford reactive cost cutting or ad hoc optimization efforts. MSPs supply the expertise, tooling, and execution that many organizations lack internally. Under the competent direction of a managed service provider. FinOps can bring the financial discipline, accountability, and peace of mind to your organization–before the cloud bill comes due.

For more on cloud implementation and how Integris can help, check out Integris cloud solutions here.