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In our previous blog post, we introduced the concept of FinOps and its importance in managing cloud costs. In this post, we will explore the FinOps Foundation and its maturity model, which provides a framework for organizations to assess and improve their FinOps practices.
The FinOps Foundation
The FinOps Foundation is a non-profit organization that promotes best practices for cloud financial management. It provides resources, training, and a community for FinOps practitioners. The foundation’s mission is to advance the discipline of FinOps through education, standards, and collaboration.
The FinOps Maturity Model
The FinOps Foundation has developed a maturity model to help organizations assess their current FinOps practices and identify areas for improvement. It consists of three stages: Crawl, Walk, and Run.

- Crawl: Basic cost management and visibility. At this stage, organizations focus on gaining visibility into their cloud costs and usage. They track their cloud spending, analyze usage patterns, and identify cost-saving opportunities.
- Walk: Advanced cost optimization and forecasting. In this stage, organizations implement cost-saving opportunities identified in the Crawl stage. They also focus on forecasting cloud costs and setting up budgeting mechanisms.
- Run: Comprehensive FinOps practices with full accountability and governance. At this stage, organizations have mature FinOps practices in place. They continuously monitor and manage cloud costs, ensure accountability, and drive business value.
Assessing Your FinOps Maturity
Organizations can use the maturity model to evaluate their current state and set goals for improvement. Regular assessments help track progress and ensure continuous improvement. The FinOps Foundation provides resources and tools to help organizations assess their maturity and identify areas for improvement.
Key Domains and Capabilities
The FinOps maturity model consists of four key domains and a total of 22 capabilities across each of the domains:
- Understand Cloud Usage & Cost: The outcome of this Domain is better understanding of an organization’s use of the cloud. Within this Domain, organizations work to gather all the information required to perform FinOps. This includes direct and imputed cloud cost, cloud usage, observability, utilization, and sustainability data, and other datasets required by any FinOps Domain. Activities in this Domain also define the organizational metadata to categorize, allocate and summarize cloud cost and usage, and define the reporting and analytics processes making that data available for use by all FinOps Personas.
- Quantify Business Value: Organizations develop Capabilities in this Domain to connect the usage and cost data with the business value it creates, helping ensure value is transparent and within expectations. Within this Domain, organizations map monetary and non-monetary cloud costs to budgets, use historical information and future plans to forecast, establish and measure technical and organizational KPIs, and perform benchmarking across teams, business units and with other organizations.
- Optimize Cloud Usage & Cost: This Domain focuses on cloud efficiency, ensuring organizations only use the resources when they provide value to the organization; and that resources used are purchased at the lowest acceptable cost and impact to meet the organization’s goals. Organizations will measure efficiency in a variety of ways, including monetary cost, carbon usage, or more traditional IT operational efficiency measures. Capabilities in this Domain allow the organization to manage the types, timing and amounts of cloud resources used, and the rates that are paid for those resources. Capabilities here also address architecture modernization, sustainability considerations for FinOps teams, and the use of licensed and consumption-based SaaS products.
- Manage the FinOps Practice: This Domain enables continuous improvement to change and align the entire organization – its people, processes and technology – to adopt FinOps and use cloud in ways that create value for the company. Capabilities here are centered on effective FinOps operation, enablement of the whole organization, improved interaction with all other personas and business functions to support and represent cloud use more effectively.
Information reproduced under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License from FinOps Framework by FinOps Foundation.
Understanding the FinOps maturity model is essential for organizations looking to optimize their cloud costs. By assessing their current state and setting goals for improvement, organizations can continuously improve their FinOps practices and drive business value. In our next blog post in this series on FinOps, we will share real-world examples of how organizations have successfully implemented FinOps practices.
For years now, Invero has made its mission to help clients maximize the value of their investments in cloud because we are firm believers in the benefits that the cloud can bring to organizations of all sizes. FinOps is core to achieving this mission because without proper governance around cloud spend and tying that back to the business value that each dollar spent is driving, then there is a high risk of wasting money or not achieving optimal return on investment.
Many organizations that we work with struggle to know where to start, which is why we developed FinOps Ready™. This is our solution to help you develop a roadmap for maturing your FinOps practice based on your unique needs, it’s not a one-size fits all or cookie cutter plan. Learn more and get started for FREE on your own today, or contact us to get help from our experts.