As cloud adoption continues to evolve, FinOps has become an essential discipline for organizations looking to maximize the value of their cloud investments. The 2025 State of FinOps Report provides key insights into the priorities, challenges, and opportunities shaping the future of cloud financial management. From AI-driven spending to the expansion of FinOps into SaaS and private cloud, the report highlights how businesses are adapting to an increasingly complex technology landscape.
Cloud+ and the Expanding Scope of FinOps
The days of FinOps being solely about public cloud cost management are fading. Organizations are now applying FinOps principles to a “Cloud+” approach, extending financial accountability beyond traditional cloud environments into SaaS, private cloud, and even data centers. This shift reflects a growing need for visibility across all technology spend, helping businesses make more informed decisions.
With this expansion comes an increased focus on cost forecasting, budgeting, and allocation, ensuring that organizations understand their spending before jumping straight into optimization efforts. FinOps teams are being tasked with managing a broader range of costs, requiring additional investment in automation, upskilling, and cross-team collaboration.
Optimization Remains a Top Priority
Despite the growing complexity of cloud cost management, workload optimization and waste reduction remain the number one priority for FinOps practitioners. Businesses are still seeking ways to cut unnecessary expenses while maximizing the efficiency of their cloud environments. However, there’s a noticeable shift toward governance and policy enforcement as organizations mature in their FinOps practices.
Rather than chasing one-off cost savings, businesses are looking to establish long-term strategies that ensure sustainable cloud financial management. This means implementing governance frameworks, automating policy enforcement, and ensuring cost accountability across teams.
The Rise of AI Spending and FinOps for AI
Artificial intelligence has emerged as a major investment area, with 63% of organizations now managing AI-related cloud costs – a dramatic increase from the previous year. AI workloads bring unique financial challenges, requiring new cost visibility measures before optimization efforts can take center stage.
For many businesses, managing AI costs is still in its early stages, focusing on spend tracking, forecasting, and cost allocation rather than immediate efficiency improvements. However, as AI adoption matures, we can expect optimization to become a more pressing concern.
FinOps Teams: Doing More with Less
As FinOps expands into new spending areas, teams are being asked to do more without significant increases in resources. This creates a risk of practitioners spreading themselves too thin, making it crucial for organizations to invest in:
- Upskilling and staff augmentation to handle growing workloads
- Automation and tooling to improve efficiency and reduce manual effort
- Stronger cross-team collaboration between FinOps, finance, and engineering
The most successful FinOps teams aren’t just reacting to cloud costs—they are proactively aligning their work with business strategy, ensuring that cloud spend directly contributes to organizational goals.
How Surveil Can Help
At Surveil, we understand the challenges of managing cloud costs in an ever-changing landscape. Our cloud optimization solutions work alongside your FinOps framework to deliver deeper insights, smarter automation, and real-time cost efficiencies. Whether you’re tackling AI spend, SaaS costs, or multi-cloud governance, Surveil helps you get the most value from your cloud investments.
Want to take control of your cloud costs? Let’s talk.