FinOps X 2025
Join the largest gathering of FinOps professionals at FinOps X on June 2-5 in the beautiful San Diego.
The 5th Annual State of FinOps survey conducted from within the FinOps Foundation community of large cloud spenders is now available. Here are takeaways from the survey which surveyed large companies responsible for over $69bn of cloud spend.
The Era of Cloud+ in FinOps
FinOps is as important as ever for delivering value from cloud—and increasingly—from other technology investments, with the majority of practices beginning to manage SaaS spend, and nearly half managing licensing. Some FinOps practices have begun to apply their capabilities to private cloud and data center scopes of spending in a “Cloud+” approach to FinOps.
While optimization continues to remain a top priority for cloud spend, Understanding Costs and Quantifying Value (budgeting, forecasting, allocation, etc.) are being applied first to other Scopes of technology before optimization as companies look to get improved predictability and understanding of technology spend in addition to Cloud.
AI spending is now managed by the majority of respondents (63% up from 31% last year) and is expected to impact all but a few FinOps practitioners in the coming year in line with the large amounts of additional investment coming across cloud, SaaS and in data-centers.
Practitioners are now also being asked to do more with their current resources, and increasingly those running related technology management practices are merging their work with FinOps. There is a risk of being stretched thin without additional investment in areas such as upskilling, automation or staff augmentation as organizations look to increase productivity within FinOps Capabilities.
About the State of FinOps
The State of FinOps is an annual survey conducted by the FinOps Foundation since 2020 to collect information about key priorities, industry trends, and the direction of the FinOps practice. The survey informs a range of Foundation activities and tells the broader market how FinOps is practiced in a variety of organizations.
This year respondents include large enterprise organizations with 31% currently spending more than $50 million dollars a year in public cloud, 20% spending more than $100m/yr and over 20 $1bn/yr. 41% are from organizations with more than 20,000 employees, 15% are over 100k people.
Workload Optimization and Waste Reduction: the clear current top priority for FinOps Practitioners
Workload optimization and waste reduction is the top priority by a clear margin for FinOps practitioners, followed by Full Allocation of cloud Spending, and Accurate Forecasting of spend.
Optimization was also a top priority for 2024 and has remained a priority for 50% of practitioner respondents, while other FinOps Capabilities have declined in priority compared to last year. This shows that organizations continue to look for ways to reduce spending without reducing the value they are getting from their cloud investments.
In the next 12 months, governance and optimization are top for future priorities, but managing additional Scopes of spending is increasing
For future priorities over the next 12 months, workload optimization drops a significant 21% to second, while implementing governance and policy at scale becomes the top priority.
This could be related to the maturity of the previous optimization efforts, as the longer you have done optimization the more you realize you need governance policies to further those efforts. As the low-effort optimizations are easy to tackle first, while policies, processes, and automation are aligned to more maturity as a practice.
The highest changes in priorities are Managing AI/ML spend (+4 places), Managing costs beyond public cloud (+5 places), and Getting to unit economics (+5 places).
“Organizational Alignment” still the top way to achieve priorities but “Investment and Tooling” has risen significantly
By categorizing freeform responses we can see trends to understand what practitioners need to achieve their priority. Organizational Alignment (e.g., leadership buy in) has reduced from last year (-9%) which is a positive indicator but it still remains the most needed path to achieve priorities. Investment and Tooling had a large increase (+20%), example responses for this was time, upskilling, tooling and specific call outs for automation.
With organizational buy-in starting to take effect and reduce, the focus is shifting on resourcing and productivity, especially where FinOps practitioners' workload has increased.
Practitioners are increasing effort in many capabilities while reducing effort in very few
We asked practitioners what areas they are actively trying to improve and just maintain in the next 12 months with responses indicating the level of planned effort.
Responses showed that the average number of capabilities practitioners were looking to increase effort was close to 12 and only decreasing effort in 1 to 2
This is a sign practitioners have a full workload and supports the previous sentiment of increasing investment into the practice. Currently practitioners risk stretching themselves thin across efforts, practitioners have to be willing to reduce effort in certain capabilities to maximize impact from the most valuable opportunities.
FinOps Teams are managing additional scopes (Cloud+) of technology spend
When asked about what additional areas of technology spend does the FinOps team manage today and planning to in the next 12-months. We saw the highest was managing SaaS spend with a combined total of 65% of responses, this includes the highest predicted increase in the next 12 months of 25%.
It is good to understand what types of spend FinOps practitioners are managing and planning to manage but we wanted to dig a bit deeper into what capabilities are they applying to these areas.
The responses showed that practitioners are applying fundamental capabilities to the additional scopes of spend. These are capabilities under the Understand Cloud Usage and Cost and Quantify Business Value Domains from the FinOps Framework that are key to strengthening their understanding. These capabilities enable practitioners to get their arms around these new areas of spend.
Our expectation, as maturity grows in these areas, we will start seeing optimization also appearing in these top capabilities across the Scopes of spend as optimization opportunities appear over time at specific financial moments which are related to that scope.
More than half of practitioners have plans to use FOCUS in the next 12-months but there are challenges to overcome
When asked ‘How are you planning to use FOCUS in the next 12 months?’ Only 18% are not planning to adopt FOCUS at all, 24% are still figuring out their plans, while 57% answered they have plans to use FOCUS.
Of those planning to use FOCUS, more than half are looking to automatically integrate it into their data pipeline, 1/3 plan to use a 3rd party tool or service when available and 16% plan to use it for manual data analysis.
In freeform answers, practitioners also raised the challenges to FOCUS adoption: time, skills available were raised again, while others were awaiting adoption from billing generators and vendors. Example responses included: ‘Time and resource capacity’, ‘Tech debt & lack of SaaS providers natively exporting it’ or limitations such as ‘Internal IT restrictions’.
There was a clear desire for the open-source billing specification but hurdles still exist to wider adoption. With the inclusion of SaaS data in the upcoming 1.2 release of FOCUS, we expect to see an increase in demand and adoption of FOCUS as more SaaS providers begin to output their billing data in the unified format.
Sustainability reporting remains flat focusing on visibility with optimizations primarily driven by cost.
When we look at how many practitioners report metrics on Cloud Sustainability we see that overall globally it has remained very similar to last year with a 1% difference.
53% of European practices (an 18% increase from last year) are now reporting carbon, but this increase is slower than was predicted in 2024. North America, which had the largest segment of respondents, remained flat YoY at 29% of those reporting cloud carbon.
15% of global practices are making optimizations based on cost. Only 3% of FinOps practices are making optimizations based on carbon considerations.
Intersecting disciplines: ITFM and ITSM are top partners; while TBM, ITAM, and SAM increasingly integrate with FinOps
When comparing the current data with 2023 data on intersecting disciplines, we see separate team collaboration is increasing in most areas, with the biggest increases being in ITFM and ITSM.
ITAM and TBM have both seen increases in integrated teams merging with FinOps since 2023 (purple bars). ITAM also saw a growth in separate team collaboration (green bars), whereas separate TBM team collaboration was nearly flat, with the data showing the integrated team approach growing more quickly.
Sustainability/ESG teams also saw limited overall growth in separate team collaboration and a reduction in integrated teams, bucking expectations from previous surveys of large scale integration coming to fruition.
Planned AI investment is weighted towards public cloud, Financial Services plan to invest more heavily in AI in the Data center and Private Cloud than other industries
When asked ‘What is your organization's planned investment in AI in the next 12 months?’ The large majority is weighted towards public cloud offerings, 69% investing in SaaS and 30% planning investment in Data center and/or private cloud.
97% of respondents are investing in multiple infrastructure areas for AI, this reinforces and is accelerating how managing an organization's AI spend will require taking on new spend areas for FinOps practitioners.
When looking at this data by the Financial Services industry segment, there is increased investment overall and heavier investment into Data Center and Private cloud.
The most important activities to managing AI fall under the FinOps Domains of Understand Cloud Usage and Cost and Quantify Business Value. Capabilities like Allocation, Data Ingestion, Reporting, Anomaly Detection and Planning and Forecasting indicated a strong need to simply understand AI spending.
For AI, optimization activities are a much lower priority. We expect optimization to become more important as organizations get the fundamentals of cost visibility in place and start to align AI spend to overall business value.
Conclusion
It is no surprise that cost optimization has been a consistent top priority over the years. Gaining efficiencies within technology spend will always likely be a priority for organizations. However, practitioners are being asked to look at a wider scope of technology spending, and are investing first into activities related to cost visibility and business value.
The majority of FinOps practices now manage AI costs, further driving an expansion of scopes as AI investments are spread across multiple infrastructure categories. As practitioners add these areas of spend they are early on the maturity curve so most of the effort is placed into capabilities that help them understand the spending: estimation of plans, forecasting, understanding existing costs and working with finance partners to allocate them to teams.
It is likely that optimization and efficiency will become more important for AI once maturity in cost visibility, allocation and forecasting is established and confidence in the underlying value for each AI use case exists. More investment in upskilling is needed to achieve that maturity and move into AI optimization.
FinOps practitioners have established strong financial accountability through collaboration across engineering, business, and finance, positioning them well to tackle cloud plus additional technology types—including Saas, Datacenter, and AI.
As practitioners take on the responsibility of additional spend areas they risk spreading themselves thin. They are being asked to achieve more by increasing productivity through operational efficiencies.
Practitioners are reporting that they need investments into upskilling, staff augmentation, tooling and automation. The most successful FinOps practices are balancing their efforts by continually aligning their activities to the business strategy and applying the most relevant FinOps Capabilities to each new scope of technology spend.
There were 861 survey respondents representing ~$69B in public cloud spend, further data can be found in the State of FinOps data library.