State of FinOps 2025 Report

The State of FinOps 2025 report has been released. This report is a great indicator to map trends and track behaviour of FinOps practitioners over the past year.  https://data.finops.org/

What is FinOps?

FinOps is an operational framework and cultural practice which maximizes the business value of cloud, enables timely data-driven decision-making, and creates financial accountability through collaboration between engineering, finance, and business teams. 

Highlights from the report

• The 'Cloud+' era of FinOps is taking shape, with more respondents now managing more 'scopes' (predominantly SaaS and licensing) of spend alongside public cloud
• Workload optimisation and waste reduction is (still) the top priority by a clear margin for FinOps practitioners
• BUT workload optimisation drops in priority when predicting the next 12 months behind implementing governance and policy at scale. The reason given is that established organisations need governance and policies to realise higher-effort FinOps recommendations.
• • The highest predicted increases in priority over the next 12 months are:
  • • Managing costs beyond public cloud
    • Getting to unit economics
    • Enabling automation
    • Managing AI/ML spend
• There was a clear desire for FOCUS but hurdles still exist to wider adoption:
• • time and skills required for implementation
  • waiting for adoption from vendors
  • 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
• Sustainability reporting remains flat focusing on visibility with optimizations primarily driven by cost
• • Respondents are not generally making optimisations based on carbon impact, or choosing not to prioritise carbon impact over cost.

How can we help?

If you are looking to maximise the value of your IT investments, align cost and usage reporting across vendors or increase the predictability of your spend for SaaS or Cloud environments, Cortex Reply can get you started with a FinOps assessment.

Whether you are starting on your FinOps journey, need guidance with establishing a strong FinOps culture or would like help unlocking longer-term recommendations, we would love to chat.