Engagement 07 · FinOps
Move from reactive cost firefighting to a sustainable FinOps practice. Allocation, budgets, anomaly detection, governance, and reporting — built so finance, engineering, and leadership all see the same numbers.
Why this exists
Quick-win cost optimisation captures the easy savings. But without a FinOps practice, the same waste reappears in six months. The Review establishes the operating model: how cost is allocated, who's accountable, what's reported to leadership, and how anomalies surface before they hit the bill. It's the difference between cost surprises and cost predictability.
What's included
Cost mapped to teams, products, and environments via tags and subscription strategy. Shared services and untagged spend handled cleanly.
Per-team or per-product budgets with thresholds, forecasts, and the right alert routing — engineering when usage spikes, finance when forecast slips.
Detection on unusual spend patterns (sudden VM scale-up, runaway log ingestion, forgotten test environments) so you find waste in days, not invoices.
Tag enforcement, SKU restrictions, region restrictions, and approval workflows for high-cost resources. Enforced via Azure Policy where it makes sense.
Power BI or Azure Workbook dashboards for engineering (operational view), product (per-product spend), and leadership (trend and forecast).
Monthly cost review cadence, owner per cost centre, escalation path, and a documented FinOps runbook your team can actually follow.
Deliverables
Timeline
Current spend, current tagging, stakeholders, and reporting needs. The model is sketched before we build.
Allocation rules, budgets, dashboards, governance policies, anomaly detection — configured and tested.
Walkthrough with engineering, finance, and leadership. First monthly review run together.
FAQ
We just need to cut costs — do we need this?
If you only need a one-off saving, the Azure Performance & Cost Optimisation engagement is more direct. FinOps Review is for when you want the savings to stick and the surprises to stop.
Our tagging is a mess. Is that a blocker?
No — fixing tagging is part of the engagement. We agree the model, then enforce it via policy and remediate the gaps.
Power BI vs Azure Workbooks for dashboards?
Whatever your team will actually use. Power BI for finance audiences, Workbooks for operational teams, sometimes both. The model behind them is the same either way.
Do you cover non-Azure cloud spend?
We focus on Azure here. If you're multi-cloud and need a unified view, we'll flag that in the discovery call and recommend an approach — sometimes a third-party FinOps platform makes sense, often it doesn't.
What happens after the engagement?
The runbook is designed for your team to run alone. If you'd rather have us co-pilot the monthly review and continuously improve the practice, that's part of Ongoing Platform Support.
Next step
Book a 30-minute discovery call. We'll talk through your current setup and stakeholders before agreeing scope.
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