FinOps excellence unlocked: Our strategic differentiators

Capgemini’s winning formula for financial operations excellence

FinOps is more than a methodology. It’s a cultural shift that promotes accountability by aligning cloud engineering and finance teams to function as a cohesive unit. This collaboration enables near real-time, data-driven decision-making to ensure every dollar spent is optimized.

However, the FinOps team has encountered several challenges when a structured approach is not consistently applied. While FinOps offers a robust framework of principles and capabilities, implementing isolated initiatives or selectively adopting a few principles on an ad hoc basis often results in only short-term gains. Enterprises struggle to realize the full potential of FinOps due to fragmented adoption and the absence of a unified strategy.

Some of the key challenges include:

• Delays in execution: Cloud engineers often face bottlenecks due to delayed approvals from the application portfolio team, impeding progress on proposed initiatives.
• Lack of real-time insights: The absence of a comprehensive tooling platform limits access to timely data, making informed decision-making difficult.
• Unclear ownership: Limited visibility about relevant technical and functional stakeholders who owns the cloud resources hampers the ability to drive decisions forward efficiently.

A cohesive and well-structured FinOps strategy is essential to overcoming these barriers and unlocking long-term value.

In our approach to FinOps, we collaborate closely with enterprises to establish a top-down framework that is strengthened by executive sponsorship and empowered teams. At the heart of our approach lies transparency, which serves as the foundation for all decision-making and collaboration. overall methodology is built on the three pillars:

1. People – Empowering FinOps team with clear roles and accountability
2. Assets – Aligning strategic vision with financial and operational goals
3. Tools – Leveraging robust tools and data to drive informed, real-time decisions.

Designated people forming the FinOps team – including FinOps practitioners, assigned engineers, and analysts – collaborate across teams to conduct a comprehensive 360° analysis of cloud resources, aligned with each FinOps capability. To help customers initiate their FinOps journey, we’ve developed a Flash Assessment. This instrument is designed to provide a clear understanding of the current ecosystem and identify key areas for optimization around strategy, cloud consumption visibility, optimization, adoption, and tooling and automation.

Once the initial step toward FinOps is complete, we advocate for treating FinOps not as a linear lifecycle but as a continuous, iterative process. This approach empowers clients to embrace a dynamic and ongoing cloud operations model, i.e., FinOps as a service.

FinOps should evolve through progressive stages, starting with Crawl, advancing to Walk, and eventually reaching Run. This phased approach allows organizations to begin with a modest scope and gradually scale in size, complexity, and capability. To support this journey, we’ve developed a FinOps Maturity Assessment based on proven, cloud-agnostic best practices drawn from our extensive experience across diverse enterprises. This assessment helps customers establish a clear baseline for FinOps adoption across key capability areas.

Capgemini Flash Assessment is a rapid, high-level evaluation methodology applied across various domains. On the other side, a FinOps Maturity Assessment offers a structured approach to evaluating an organization’s capabilities in managing cloud financial operations.

Additionally, we’ve developed a comprehensive internal FinOps repository that serves as a centralized resource hub. These resources are thoughtfully curated to help optimize operations and enhance the financial efficiency of cloud infrastructure services. It includes:

• Standard operating procedures to guide consistent execution
• An automation library focused on streamlining and automating key FinOps initiatives to boost efficiency
• A best practices cookbook that captures industry-standard approaches.

In today’s dynamic enterprise environment, organizations rely on a broad spectrum of FinOps tools, including cloud-native services, third-party applications, open-source tools, and custom build/proprietary platforms to meet their operational goals. Our strategy is intentionally designed to be flexible and inclusive. We support native tools from hyperscalers, client-owned FinOps solutions, and third-party platforms alike. This approach ensures resilient and adaptable support for FinOps operations, regardless of the tooling landscape.

Complementing these tools, we offer internally developed dashboards, both hyperscaler-specific and multicloud, that empower data-driven decision-making across FinOps initiatives.

Our differentiator: FinOps beyond basics We take a forward-thinking approach to FinOps, one that goes beyond the traditional focus on IaaS cost optimization through resource tuning, waste reduction, or rate negotiation. Instead, we enable enterprises to significantly advance their FinOps maturity by adopting our accelerators with a comprehensive and step-by-step approach:

This holistic approach empowers organizations to undergo a cultural and operational transformation, integrating financial accountability, engineering agility, and real-time decision-making. We emphasize adopting these principles collectively, as overemphasis on any single area may lead to imbalances and unintended challenges.