The FinOps Journey: From Visibility to Business Value

FinOps Maturity Phases Phase 1: Shedding Light on IT Costs Phase 2: Planning Ahead Phase 3: Running IT Like a Business Final Thoughts Related Articles The FinOps Journey: From Visibility to Business Value Capacity Management: The IT Balancing Act You Can’t Ignore Deploy Distributed LLM Inference with GPUDirect RDMA over InfiniBand in VMware Private AI Let’s be real — IT costs can be a black box. Servers hum, invoices arrive, and before you know it, your cloud spend is climbing faster than your budget can keep up. That’s where FinOps comes in. If you haven’t heard the term before, Financial Operations (FinOps) is all about bringing financial discipline to the way you run IT. It’s the practice of tracking, forecasting, and optimizing spending on IT resources so that every dollar works harder. FinOps isn’t just for the big players anymore. What started as a process for larger service providers has now been embraced by smaller businesses, giving them the same ability to control cloud costs, improve efficiency, and drive smarter financial decisions. Why? Because when IT understands the true cost of delivering services, it stops being “just” a cost center and becomes a strategic business partner. And every organization’s path to FinOps maturity is different, but most will move through these three phases. Phase 1: Gaining an understanding of their costs (Inform) Phase 2: To planning and budgeting for future projects (Optimize) Phase 3: To ultimately, running IT like a business (Operate) The good news? Regardless of where you are in the process, VMware Cloud Foundation and its FinOps capabilities can help at every step. Phase 1 of the FinOps journey begins with understanding and managing your costs. Why This Matters: Financial Operations (FinOps) is about more than just saving money.