What are the best FinOps practices for optimizing costs in a hybrid cloud model?

All answers to this question.

The "hidden" cost of hybrid is often the egress fees from moving data back to on-prem. To fix this, we implemented a data tiering strategy where only "hot" data used for real-time reporting stays in the cloud, while "cold" data is immediately moved back to our on-premise archival storage. From a FinOps perspective, you need to use a tool like Apptio or CloudHealth that can ingest data from your on-premise hardware depreciation cycles and your public cloud billing. This gives you a "unified bill" that shows the finance team exactly what each application costs across the entire lifecycle, not just the monthly cloud spend.

   Answered 2025-04-20 by Barbara Martinez

Do you have a dedicated "Cloud Business Office" or FinOps team that meets weekly, or is cost management still just a secondary task for your lead architects?

   Answered 2025-05-05 by Joseph Lewis

• Joseph, it's currently a "secondary task," which is probably why it's a mess. We are actually hiring our first dedicated FinOps manager next month. We realized that without someone looking at the dashboards every day, we are just reacting to the bill at the end of the month instead of preventing waste.

     Commented 2025-05-15 by Steven Thompson

Right-sizing is key. We found that our on-prem VMs were massively over-provisioned compared to what we needed in the cloud. Don't lift-and-shift your mistakes.

   Answered 2025-06-01 by Nancy Adams

• Nancy is spot on. We reduced our cloud-burst footprint by 40% just by actually analyzing our CPU usage before migrating the workload.

     Commented 2025-06-05 by Charles Harris