FinOps Beyond Public Cloud – A Full Circle Moment
Over the years, I’ve worked closely with organizations running large-scale private cloud and on-premises environments. And to be honest, much of what I apply today in FinOps, I’ve learned by working side by side with these organizations — understanding not just the technical side, but also the financial and operational challenges that come with running large IT estates.
Even though we didn’t call it FinOps back then, the questions were already there. I clearly remember asking a customer one day: “Do you actually know how much you pay for energy and cooling in your datacenter?” The customer literally started laughing and said: “No, that’s not my responsibility. Someone is paying that bill, but it’s definitely not coming out of my pocket.”
And that reaction says it all. These were — and in many cases still are — real costs with no clear ownership.
But here’s what’s changed. Today, those costs are becoming visible, unavoidable, and increasingly painful. Over the past months, I’ve spoken to many organizations who are suddenly confronted with exploding costs in their on-prem and private cloud environments — sometimes doubled, tripled, or even five times higher than before. And that raises serious questions: What is driving these costs? How much are we actually spending? And how do we get this under control before it gets out of hand?
Why Now? The Economic Reality Forces Change
The reason these questions are coming up now is simple: the world looks very different from five or ten years ago. Back then, companies could afford to be a bit relaxed when it came to cost management — especially in IT. Budgets were growing, cloud was exciting, and optimization was often an afterthought.
But those days are over.
Today, we live in a world of uncontrollables — rising energy prices, supply chain issues, inflation, and geopolitical tensions. Things we can’t influence directly. And when organizations are faced with that kind of volatility, the natural response is to take control over what they can control — and cost is a big part of that.
This is why FinOps thinking is more relevant than ever, even beyond public cloud. Because even if you can’t control the market or the price of energy, you can control how efficiently your workloads are running, how smartly your licenses are allocated, and how well your SaaS subscriptions are being used.
Applying FinOps Principles On-Prem — It’s About Mindset, Not Tools
But let’s be honest: introducing FinOps thinking into private cloud and datacenter environments doesn’t magically create cost visibility overnight. We’re not suddenly going to see a perfect breakdown of every cost just because we apply FinOps principles.
Even the FinOps Foundation acknowledges this reality. In their work on Scopes and evolving the FinOps Framework, they recognize that visibility and cost management in on-prem and SaaS environments are still maturing.
And yet — the thinking needs to start now. Because while we may not have all the tools yet, what we do have are the principles from public cloud FinOps that we can start applying today. It would be fantastic if we would ever have a FOCUS for the on-prem world. Cross fingers some smart people start looking into that soon.
Principles like:
• Cost ownership and accountability
• Usage-based thinking
• Value optimization over pure cost cutting
So even if your on-prem costs still sit in a shared budget, and you don’t yet have perfect metering of every VM or workload, you can start by asking the right questions and challenging old ways of working.
And let’s be real: power and cooling costs may be relatively easy to track, especially in colocation setups where you pay by rack or kilowatt. But when you start thinking about shared infrastructure, software licenses tied to workloads, and departmental usage, that’s where the real challenge begins.
From “Nice to Have” to “Business Critical”
In many ways, what we’re seeing now is a mindset shift.
Where cost optimization was once a “nice to have”, it has become business critical. Companies no longer optimize because it looks good — they optimize because they have to in order to survive in this economic reality.
And this is exactly what the FinOps Foundation is addressing with the introduction of Scopes in their latest framework update. By officially expanding FinOps beyond public cloud to also include SaaS, Licensing, Private Cloud, and Datacenter, they acknowledge what we are seeing in the field:
Every IT cost should be tracked, understood, and optimized — no matter where it lives.
Workload Optimization: A Starting Point
So where do you start? One practical way is Workload Optimization.
By reviewing how workloads run today — and right-sizing them to fit actual needs instead of overprovisioning — you can immediately start to unleash the power of cloud thinking inside your datacenter. It’s not about buying new tools or rearchitecting everything overnight. It’s about starting to apply the FinOps mindset:
Are we using what we pay for?
Are we optimizing for value?
Are we aligning IT spend with business outcomes?
A Full Circle Moment — and a Call to Action
For me, this really feels like a full circle moment. The same conversations I had years ago with organizations about understanding datacenter costs are coming back — but this time with a clearer framework to guide them. Thanks to the work of the FinOps Foundation, and the broader FinOps community, we finally have the mindset, principles, and community knowledge to start asking the right questions and move forward.
So if your organization is now facing the real cost of private cloud, SaaS, or datacenter infrastructure, know that you’re not alone. And you don’t have to figure this out by yourself.
FinOps has evolved to help manage these costs too — and now is the time to embrace that broader perspective.
Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this:
FinOps is no longer just about managing your cloud bill. It’s about making every euro, dollar, or pound work as hard as possible — across every piece of technology you use.