From the first month
The first savings
- Reservations and savings plans on the baseline
- Cleaning of forgotten resources
- Storage tiering and log pricing tiers
Our approach
A 4-phase FinOps approach to reduce costs, then stay in control
A pragmatic method, built over eight years of engagements in large enterprises: make costs visible, find the savings, get them applied, then make sure waste doesn't come back.
FinOps in practice
Make every cloud euro visible, useful and owned
FinOps (Cloud Financial Operations) brings finance, IT and engineering teams together around one goal: spending right. We cover all three phases of the FinOps Foundation framework, and we add a fourth, essential one: staying in control over time.
1 · Inform
Understand your spending
- Reading the bill: which services, which cost items, which trends
- Allocation of every euro to an application, a business unit and an environment
- Custom dashboard refreshed daily: costs, forecast, CO₂, alerting on variations
2 · Optimize
Find the savings
- Recommendations based on each component's real usage
- Reservation strategy: Reserved Instances and savings plans
- Re-architecture of the most expensive services, after in-depth analysis
- Workshops with the teams behind the costliest applications, to converge on a cheaper solution
- Every action quantified and prioritized by impact
3 · Operate
Get it applied, measure it
- Remediation plan driven together with Ops teams
- Real savings measured after implementation
- Savings tracked at the monthly SteerCo
4 · Stay in control
Keep waste from coming back
- Lasting FinOps governance: showback / chargeback, rules, committees
- FinOps by design: standards and building blocks, so new optimizations no longer need to appear
- Monitoring and alerting on the forecast
Aligned with the FinOps Framework
Our approach covers the 4 domains of the FinOps Framework
The FinOps Foundation's FinOps Framework is the discipline's reference. It organizes FinOps into domains, the expected outcomes, and capabilities, the way to achieve them. Here is what we concretely deliver in each.
1
Understand Usage & Cost
Data IngestionAllocationReporting & AnalyticsAnomaly Management
What we deliver
- Custom dashboard refreshed daily, connected to your CMDB
- Minimal tagging, often a single tag: ≈ 100% of costs tied to an application
- Monitoring and alerting on drifts, before they cost tens of thousands of euros
2
Quantify Business Value
Planning & EstimatingForecastingBudgetingKPIs & BenchmarkingUnit Economics
What we deliver
- Forecast and budget tracking by application and business unit
- Cost estimates for new projects, and build vs buy decisions
- FinOps KPIs tracked at the SteerCo, savings measured on the bill
3
Optimize Usage & Cost
Architecting & Workload PlacementUsage OptimizationRate OptimizationLicensing & SaaSSustainability
What we deliver
- Rightsizing, auto Stop and Start on demand, cleaning, log filtering
- Reserved Instances and savings plans strategy, Azure Hybrid Benefit
- Re-architecture of the most expensive services, with application teams
- GreenOps: carbon footprint tracked alongside costs
4
Manage the FinOps Practice
Executive Strategy AlignmentGovernance, Policy & RiskInvoicing & ChargebackFinOps AssessmentEducation & EnablementAutomation, Tools & Services
What we deliver
- FinOps governance, steering committees, showback then chargeback
- FinOps scoring and a best-practice guide for teams
- FinOps by design: standards, building blocks and a recommendation engine
Who we work with
FinOps is a team sport. We act as the FinOps practitioner: we provide the tooling, run the practice, and connect every stakeholder.
EngineeringFinanceLeadershipProcurementApplication ownersITAMITSMSecuritySustainability
Crawl, Walk, Run
Our FinOps scoring measures each business unit's maturity along the framework's stages and sets the next step. We don't aim for “Run” everywhere: we aim for the right level, where the financial stakes justify it.
- Crawl
- Walk
- Run
Source: FinOps Framework, FinOps Foundation, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Domain and capability names are the framework's; the mapping to our deliverables is our own.
Visibility & tagging
The foundation of FinOps: everyone sees what they pay for
You can't optimize what you can't see. The first pillar is rigorous tagging linked to the CMDB, and a clear dashboard where application owners and budget holders see exactly what they consume. They are often the first to spot what's wrong.
The questions everyone should be able to answer on their own
- Does what I pay match the resources I actually need today?
- Are there forgotten or unused resources to clean up? A test VM, a disk from a finished project, a POC environment…
- Is it normal that my non-prod costs more than my prod? Once an application is in run, the answer is almost always no.
- Who owns each euro spent?
- Is my cost trending as expected month over month?
Example of a warning sign
Application in run, March
Prod
€18k
Non-prod
€24k
Illustration. When non-prod costs more than prod, there are almost always environments running for nothing or oversized.
A minimal, enforced tagging policy
As few mandatory tags as possible. Depending on the client, a single tag is sometimes enough: it links the cloud to the CMDB, and every other piece of information lives in the CMDB.
app-codeCMDBowner · cost center · environment · criticality- Tag enforced at resource creation (Azure Policy)
- Automated consistency checks between the cloud and the CMDB
- Tagging compliance tracked in the dashboard
When we arrived at one client, 35% of resources were untagged. Today, 99.9% are correctly tagged.
Our methodology
A pragmatic method, built in the field
Our method wasn't written in an office. It was built over eight years of engagements in several large enterprises, each with its own organization and FinOps maturity. It has been challenged against the approaches of the big consulting firms, then enriched by the experience of other CAC 40 groups.
8 years
Of field experience
Recommendations applied in production and savings measured on the bill. We don't deliver a report that ends up in a drawer.
Every
Maturity level
Centralized or decentralized organizations, with or without chargeback, just starting or already advanced: the approach adapts to each client's starting point.
Challenged
By the big firms
The method has been tested against the approaches of the big consulting firms. We kept what delivers concrete results and dropped the rest.
Co-built
With CAC 40 peers
It keeps improving through exchanges with other large groups, especially within the CRIP, the French community of infrastructure and operations leaders.
Our approach
From assessment to savings on the bill
Finding a recommendation isn't enough: it has to be applied. A large part of our work is removing what blocks the path between the idea and production.
01
Assessment and visibility
Weeks 1 to 3- Read-only (Reader) access to billing data, no changes to your systems
- Cost mapping by service, application and environment
- Audit of tagging and of resource mapping to the CMDB
- First estimate of the cost of inaction
02
Quick wins
From the first month- Reserved Instances and savings plans on the baseline
- Cleaning: unattached disks, stale snapshots, public IPs, forgotten environments
- Azure Hybrid Benefit: reuse the Windows Server and SQL Server licenses you already own
- Storage access tiers (Hot, Cool, Cold, Archive) and log pricing tiers matched to real usage
03
Managed remediation plan
Months 2 to 6- Every cloud service is covered: compute, databases, storage, network, logs, data, AI…
- One action plan per service, prioritized by impact and run with the teams that operate it
- Reliable recommendation rules (CPU and RAM P95 over 30 days) so production is never degraded
- Prioritization: 90% of the savings often sit in about ten business units
- Automatic Stop every evening and Start on demand for non-prod VMs and VDIs
- Rightsizing, validated on a POC first, then rolled out at scale
04
Lasting governance
Ongoing- Showback then chargeback: every team sees and owns its consumption
- FinOps champions and the right committees (operational, IT, executive)
- Automatic budget alerts per scope
- FinOps by design: a checklist built into architecture reviews and the CAB
05
Measurement and reporting
Every month- Monthly SteerCo: consumption, annual forecast, variance to budget
- Real savings measured (cost before / cost after), not just estimated
- KPIs tracked: RI / savings plans coverage, rightsizing, Stop/Start, tagging
- Avoided carbon tracked in the same dashboard
The levers
Where the savings hide
The orders of magnitude below come from our engagements. They apply to the optimized resource, not to the total bill.
≈ −90%
Auto Stop + Start on demand
For non-prod VMs and VDIs: automatic shutdown every evening, restart only when someone needs it. Why not a classic Stop/Start?
≈ −50%
Reservations & savings plans
Commit for 1 or 3 years on the baseline. It's the key lever for prod, the fastest to put in place, and it doesn't touch the applications. See the strategy
−50%
Rightsizing
VMs whose CPU and RAM stay below 50% (P95 over 30 days) move down one SKU. In the cloud, you size for today's need, since scaling up is easy.
−50%
Backup & storage
Backup policy reviewed: retention matched to each environment and to the real need, long-term backups moved from the Cool to the Cold access tier. Storage cost is roughly halved.
Up to ÷4
Logs & monitoring
Filtering so only the log types you need are collected, retention matched to the need, pricing tiers adjusted (Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Sentinel). Costs can sometimes be divided by 4. See per-service work
−100%
Cleaning & licenses
Unattached disks, stale snapshots, Windows Server licenses paid twice: remove what's no longer used.
Build vs buy
The right service for the real need
Before optimizing a service, we check it's the right one. A high-end managed service or a premium SKU picked "just in case" often costs far more than the real need. Sometimes a small tool built in two days, even faster today thanks to AI, replaces an expensive service for a fraction of the price. We cost both options, development and maintenance included, before recommending.
Common belief
“Stop/Start always pays off”
Take a non-prod VM costing €30 a day. With a Reserved Instance or a savings plan, it costs about 50% less. With a classic Stop/Start (scheduled shutdown in the evening, scheduled restart in the morning), you save 50 to 60%.
But the two don't stack: a reserved VM that is stopped keeps paying for its reservation. A classic Stop/Start takes a lot of effort for barely more than a simple reservation.
What makes the difference: an automatic Stop every evening and a Start on demand. The VM only restarts when someone needs it, and savings reach about 90%.
In prod, the VM runs continuously: reservations apply, not Stop/Start.
Results
Savings measured on the bill, not promises
Our engagements take place in large international enterprises, on Azure and AWS, often over several years. Confidentiality is part of our job: we never publish client names or consumption data.
€20M+in savings delivered for our clients
~35%of the cloud bill on average: that is what these savings represent
≈ 100%of resources tagged: identified, tied to an application and charged back
On budgetspend stays within budget, and even frees up budget for other projects, such as training
Within a few months
The remediation plan applied
- Rightsizing validated on a POC, then rolled out
- Auto Stop + Start on demand in non-prod
- Projects across all services: logs, Sentinel, backup, data…
Over time
Savings that last
- Tagging, showback then chargeback
- Monitoring and alerting on the forecast
- FinOps by design in projects
FinOps governance
Reduce, then stay in control over time
Optimizing what exists isn't enough: without guardrails, every new project recreates the waste you just removed. Our promise is to reduce your costs and, above all, to keep them under control. To do that, we set up FinOps governance that makes FinOps by design: standards, building blocks and checks built into projects. From then on, everything that lands in the cloud is optimized from the start.
- 1UnderstandBill, cost allocation by application and owner, dashboard
- 2ReduceOptimization research, remediation plan applied and measured
- 3Stay in control over timeFinOps governance: standards, building blocks, monitoring
Standards with FinOps built in
- Default VM SKUs and disk types (Standard or Premium based on real need)
- Data and log retention policies
- Backup policy tailored to each environment
- Sizing for today's need, not a hypothetical peak
Ready-to-use building blocks
- The mandatory tag (often just one) applied at creation
- Auto Stop + Start on demand enabled by default in non-prod
- Budget alerts created with every scope
- Diagnostic settings and log collection filtered from day one
Checks built into projects
- FinOps checklist in architecture reviews and the CAB
- Azure Policy to block non-compliant configurations
- Review at go-live: project resources no longer needed are removed
- FinOps recommendations tracked in the dashboard
The result: every new application complies from day one with FinOps recommendations, and the savings you achieved aren't lost on the next project.
Let's talk about your standards
First conversation
How much are you losing every month on a poorly optimized cloud?
A first 30-minute conversation to understand your context and see how we can help. No commitment.