©Ashutosh Shandilya | All Rights Reserved
years of experience
00+ Clients Served
My experience in Financial analysis enables me to decode complex billing files and usage patterns and come up with effective and sustainable cost-optimization processes while managing risk and attaining optimal usage rate.
My years as a cloud engineer have taught me this: efficiency and innovation are not rivals. I understand the engineer’s struggle—balancing cost and creativity. My work ensures optimization without obstruction, and even enables more innovation.
I practice FinOps as a blend of cloud engineering, financial analytics, data visualization, and cultural shift. Whether optimizing architecture to eliminate waste, analyzing cost data to strategize RI/SP purchases, or automating dashboards in PowerBI and QuickSight to provide visibility and accountability to the correct stakeholders.
My goal is simple: Maximize cloud ROI while mitigating risk and making FinOps part of the organization's culture.
In the end, it’s about making technology work for the business, not the other way around.
The FinOps Framework, with its four domains and 24 capabilities, is always evolving. When I had to create a presentation on onboarding new clients into our FinOps practice, I needed a clear, repeatable process. As I mapped out the steps I follow—regardless of a client’s FinOps maturity (based on the FinOps Framework)—a structured five-step approach naturally emerged.
Before implementing improvements, it is crucial to evaluate where the organization currently stands in its FinOps journey.
This involves: Engaging Stakeholders, Cost Visibility & Allocation Audit, Existing FinOps Process Review, Benchmarking Against FinOps Maturity Models, Tooling & Automation Assessment.
The goal of this step is to establish a baseline of where the organization currently stands (and where it wants to go), so improvements can be targeted effectively.
One of the biggest challenges in FinOps adoption is the lack of ownership—where cloud costs fall into a grey area between finance and engineering.
This Step Involves: Define Clear Roles & Responsibilities, Enable Cross-Functional Collaboration, Develop Accountability Metrics, Ensure Leadership Buy-in, Promote a FinOps Culture.
This step is crucial because FinOps is not just a toolset; it’s a cultural shift. Without clear ownership, cost-efficiency efforts will fail to gain traction.
To drive meaningful improvements, FinOps professionals must ensure that teams have real-time access to cost and usage data so they can make informed decisions.
This step involves: Improving Cost Allocation & Tagging, Building Dashboards for Cost Awareness, Setting Up Showback & Chargeback, Alerts for Cost Anomalies & Budgets, and Empowering teams with Self-Service tools.
By making cloud costs visible, accessible, and actionable, teams take more ownership of their spending, leading to better financial decisions.
Once visibility is in place, the focus shifts to actionable cost optimization without impacting innovation.
This step includes: Rightsizing & Scaling Optimization, Implementing Commitment-Based Discounts, Using Spot & Preemptible Instances, and Optimizing Data Transfer & Storage Costs
This step is where FinOps creates tangible financial impact, ensuring cloud resources are used as efficiently as possible.
FinOps is not a one-time initiative—it’s a cyclical process of continuous improvement.
This step includes: Regular FinOps Reviews & Cost Governance Meetings, Training & Knowledge Sharing, Refining KPIs & FinOps Goals , Scaling Automation & AI-based Cost Insights , Driving Executive-Level FinOps Alignment.
This step closes the loop, making sure FinOps remains an ongoing practice embedded into the organization’s DNA.
©Ashutosh Shandilya | All Rights Reserved