Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

How to Optimize Azure Costs and Improve Cloud Efficiency with FinOps

In this episode of the FinOps on Azure podcast, Dustin Mullenix from KPMG talks about his role leading a FinOps team that handles Azure spend for KPMG's audit business. He shares how internal FinOps teams work with consulting groups, the challenges of Azure's service tiers like managed disks and SQL options, and the trade-offs between cost and performance. Dustin discusses how to handle cost changes, manage knowledge in a big company, this talk is useful for anyone dealing with cloud costs in a large setup.

The Ultimate Azure FinOps Guide: From Visibility to Optimization

In this episode of the FinOps on Azure podcast, host Michael chats with Anderson Oliveira, author of "FinOps Ultimate Guide for Azure." Anderson, a chemical engineer turned IT project manager, explains his journey into FinOps and breaks down his book, which focuses on organizing teams, measuring costs, tracking value, and building efficient practices on Azure. They discuss common challenges like stakeholder friction, the shift from CapEx to OpEx, and why focusing on value over just cutting costs is key for long-term success.

Webinar Recap: 3 Cost Allocation Mistakes FinOps Teams Can Avoid

In a webinar hosted by CloudZero on Oct. 30, 2025, Larry Advey, Director of Cloud Platform and FinOps and a respected voice in the FinOps community, joined Umesh Rao to deliver a practical session on cloud cost allocation. The session, titled Three Allocation Mistakes Most FinOps Teams Make, unpacked hard-earned lessons and offered a guided tour of CloudZero’s new Dimension Studio.

FinOps for Hybrid IT: Extending Visibility Beyond the Cloud

Controlling IT spend used to mean managing cloud invoices. Today, it’s far more complex. Modern enterprises run workloads across multiple platforms — cloud, virtualized, and on-premises — each with its own cost structures and dependencies. That’s why FinOps for hybrid IT has become essential. Extending FinOps principles beyond cloud services enables organizations to see how every part of the infrastructure contributes to cost, efficiency, and business value.

How FinTech Is Pushing the Boundaries of Intelligent Operations

In the last decade, the financial technology (FinTech) industry has evolved from a promising disruptor to a powerful force reshaping global business operations. What began as a wave of startups offering digital payments and online banking has now transformed into a full-fledged ecosystem of automation, data intelligence, and artificial decision-making.

Cultural ROI In FinOps: People Drive Pivots

When I ask clients to picture cloud cost optimization, they think dashboards, policies, maybe a clever right-sizing purchase. What they don’t picture? Meetings. Misunderstandings. Mistrust. To avoid FinOps failures, we need a new starting line; one that gets to the root of spend misalignment.

The Anti-Zombie, Battle-Tested Guide To AI FinOps: 10 Insights

When CloudZero’s CTO Erik Peterson joined the FinOps Weekly podcast in October 2025, he didn’t hold back. Instead of going on about the usual best practices of AI cost optimization, he posed challenges to how we approach AI spending. From “zombie AI experiments” eating your budget to why you should stop apologizing for using AI, these 10 insights from the podcast are worth considering in how we approach AI FinOps. (Watch the full podcast below and keep reading for more!)

FinOps Training At Scale Webinar: Key Takeaways On Proven Strategies From Fred FinOps

Cloud costs are no longer just an engineering problem or a finance problem. It’s now an everyone problem. That was the central message from the FinOps Training At Scale webinar that took place on Sept. 25, 2025, where CloudZero’s Larry Advey (a.k.a. “Fred FinOps”) and Director of Tech Enablement Umesh Rao walked through the realities of building FinOps practices that work in the real world.

Making AI Costs Make Sense: A FinOps Guide To Tagging And Tracking AI Spend

AI is reshaping the cost landscape. As a positive person, I’m going to call this change exciting! FinOps teams are integrating AI into cloud platforms and incurring the spend that comes with it. As a FinOps strategist who has helped several companies optimize cloud spend across industries, it became evident that clarity around AI spend unlocks swift, smart decisions. That’s AI … optimized.