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Using FinOps to Elevate IT in the Age of AI

Bill Lobig
Bill Lobig is VP of Apptio / IBM IT Automation
IBM

From hardware and software investments, to the cost of supporting critical talent, IT spending is ubiquitous across industries, sectors and geographies. Worldwide, IT spending is projected to exceed five trillion this year – nearly an increase of 8% from 2023. Simply put, IT is a reality within any given organization.

However, your IT investments can be negatively impacted by high operational expenses and back-office inefficiencies, which, for some organizations, can cost up to 30% of their annual revenue. With business leadership keeping a close eye on budgets, every penny matters — and that's where FinOps can help keep IT spending in check while still allowing for innovation and investment.

Adapting to Today's Cost of Business

When an IT issue is not handled correctly, not only is innovation stifled, but stakeholder trust can also be impacted (such as when there's an IT outage or slowdowns in performance). When you add new technology investments and innovations into the mix, you have a recipe for disaster. The number of companies investing $10 million+ in AI is expected to double over the next year and cloud spend is poised for takeoff. Due to these increases, it will be critical for organizations to get their IT house in order now before new investments add chaos — and higher costs — to the mix.

FinOps Provides an Opportunity for IT to Show Value — Not Just Tell

When incorporating FinOps into an organization from both a technology and a culture perspective, organizations can reduce cloud costs by as much as 30%. This leaves ample room to reallocate funds and energy into new investments, provide more accurate forecasting, create more efficient workload planning, so IT teams can focus on innovating and creating new value rather than just managing existing applications and being burdened with day-to-day tactics.

How does this work?

According to the FinOps Foundation, organizations that have a mature FinOps posture can more effectively leverage automation, appropriately allocate their spend to the areas of the business that need it most and set very high KPIs to address the most difficult of use cases. With FinOps — in real time — the IT business can provide critical insights, information and recommendations to inform increasingly important spending decisions.

Connecting the Dots — from CFO to Developer

When discussing IT spend, the most commonly considered stakeholder in charge tends to be the CFO, the CEO or another revenue and business-centric leader. However, a FinOps framework creates a holistic and non-hierarchical platform across levels, functions and responsibilities encouraging collaboration and mutual understanding between finance and IT teams.

In today's enterprise, a developer can use company resources to modernize a company's application, an IT manager can leverage resources to provision onboard new employees, and a CIO can employ resources to invest in a new AI tool — all simultaneously. However, without an element of communication or strategy, these three roles will effectively cancel out the benefits of the others.

FinOps enables professionals at all levels of the organization to have equal visibility into overall IT spend. This common language allows leaders to make informed financial decisions at the individual level like never before.

Bill Lobig is VP, Product Management, IBM Automation

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Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

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In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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Using FinOps to Elevate IT in the Age of AI

Bill Lobig
Bill Lobig is VP of Apptio / IBM IT Automation
IBM

From hardware and software investments, to the cost of supporting critical talent, IT spending is ubiquitous across industries, sectors and geographies. Worldwide, IT spending is projected to exceed five trillion this year – nearly an increase of 8% from 2023. Simply put, IT is a reality within any given organization.

However, your IT investments can be negatively impacted by high operational expenses and back-office inefficiencies, which, for some organizations, can cost up to 30% of their annual revenue. With business leadership keeping a close eye on budgets, every penny matters — and that's where FinOps can help keep IT spending in check while still allowing for innovation and investment.

Adapting to Today's Cost of Business

When an IT issue is not handled correctly, not only is innovation stifled, but stakeholder trust can also be impacted (such as when there's an IT outage or slowdowns in performance). When you add new technology investments and innovations into the mix, you have a recipe for disaster. The number of companies investing $10 million+ in AI is expected to double over the next year and cloud spend is poised for takeoff. Due to these increases, it will be critical for organizations to get their IT house in order now before new investments add chaos — and higher costs — to the mix.

FinOps Provides an Opportunity for IT to Show Value — Not Just Tell

When incorporating FinOps into an organization from both a technology and a culture perspective, organizations can reduce cloud costs by as much as 30%. This leaves ample room to reallocate funds and energy into new investments, provide more accurate forecasting, create more efficient workload planning, so IT teams can focus on innovating and creating new value rather than just managing existing applications and being burdened with day-to-day tactics.

How does this work?

According to the FinOps Foundation, organizations that have a mature FinOps posture can more effectively leverage automation, appropriately allocate their spend to the areas of the business that need it most and set very high KPIs to address the most difficult of use cases. With FinOps — in real time — the IT business can provide critical insights, information and recommendations to inform increasingly important spending decisions.

Connecting the Dots — from CFO to Developer

When discussing IT spend, the most commonly considered stakeholder in charge tends to be the CFO, the CEO or another revenue and business-centric leader. However, a FinOps framework creates a holistic and non-hierarchical platform across levels, functions and responsibilities encouraging collaboration and mutual understanding between finance and IT teams.

In today's enterprise, a developer can use company resources to modernize a company's application, an IT manager can leverage resources to provision onboard new employees, and a CIO can employ resources to invest in a new AI tool — all simultaneously. However, without an element of communication or strategy, these three roles will effectively cancel out the benefits of the others.

FinOps enables professionals at all levels of the organization to have equal visibility into overall IT spend. This common language allows leaders to make informed financial decisions at the individual level like never before.

Bill Lobig is VP, Product Management, IBM Automation

Hot Topics

The Latest

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

Today, organizations are generating and processing more data than ever before. From training AI models to running complex analytics, massive datasets have become the backbone of innovation. However, as businesses embrace the cloud for its scalability and flexibility, a new challenge arises: managing the soaring costs of storing and processing this data ...