Maximizing FinOps Success: Optimizing your Cloud Usage through FinOps Campaigns

Don’t know where to start in optimizing your cloud usage? In this blogpost, we explain how you can utilize dedicated FinOps Campaigns to tackle your inefficient cloud usage in a strategic way starting with the fastest and highest optimization potential to gain quick improvements and thus savings.

In another blogpost, we already explained how to track those savings achieved. Read here to gain some insights: Maximizing FinOps Success: Tracking your Savings! 

What are FinOps Campaigns? 

FinOps Campaigns provide a structured and strategic approach to address dedicated cloud usage optimization. They help in identifying, analyzing, and acting on the most suitable optimization potential for a company within their cloud context. By focusing on key cloud resources – such as virtual machines, databases, or storage accounts – we uncover inefficiencies, optimize performance, and ultimately reduce expenses. We thereby ensure that every dollar spent on the cloud is aligned with performance needs and business goals.  

 

Why Are FinOps Campaigns Important? 

FinOps Campaigns go beyond making random adjustments. Instead, they prioritize “low-hanging fruits” – such as downsizing underutilized VMs, removing unattached disks, or optimizing log retention – to achieve immediate savings with minimal disruption. This ensures that resources are optimized effectively before tackling more complex adjustments. 

Key Benefits of FinOps Campaigns 

These are the key benefits of FinOps Campaigns:  

• Maximizing Resource Efficiency: Campaigns deliver targeted analyses of Cloud resources, uncovering hidden inefficiencies and enabling organizations to optimize their cloud environment through rightsizing, intelligent scaling, and removing unused or redundant assets. By clearly identifying resource usage patterns, these campaigns help organizations spot performance bottlenecks, eliminate resource sprawl, and ensure that cloud resources align precisely with actual business demands. This proactive approach not only enhances operational efficiency but also significantly improves the performance and reliability of cloud infrastructure. 

  
  

• Enforcing Cost Control and Transparency: Without proper oversight, cloud expenses can rapidly escalate. FinOps Campaigns effectively control these costs by ensuring organizations only pay for necessary resources, delivering meaningful monthly and annual budget savings. Moreover, improved visibility into cloud expenditures enables teams to analyze spending patterns, identify areas for improvement, and foster a culture of financial accountability and cost-conscious decision-making. The Campaign and Savings Tracker enhance transparency and accountability by documenting each savings initiative, ensuring sustained cost-control efforts.   

  
  

• Driving Action Through Collaboration: FinOps Campaigns serve as powerful tools for spreading awareness and improving cloud cost management practices across teams. By clearly demonstrating the value of FinOps, these campaigns educate engineering and operational teams on financial accountability, resource optimization, and cost visibility. Teams become more aware of their direct impact on cloud expenses, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and proactive resource management. Campaigns also offer practical guidance and clear action items, empowering teams to collaboratively enhance their FinOps practices and achieve lasting cost efficiency.  

  
  

• Enabling Real-Time, Data-Driven Decision-Making: FinOps Campaigns utilize continuous monitoring and timely reporting to empower teams with real-time insights into cloud usage and expenditures. Instead of reacting to budget overruns after they occur, teams can proactively adjust resource allocation based on current data trends. Campaigns provide a structured framework for ongoing optimization, allowing organizations to swiftly respond, refine strategies, and prevent unnecessary costs. 

How FinOps Campaigns Support Business Goals 

FinOps Campaigns directly influence many business goals of an organization such as:  

• Maximize ROI on Cloud Investments: Every dollar saved on cloud infrastructure can be reinvested into strategic projects that drive business value.  

• Increase Operational Efficiency: By continuously optimizing our cloud resources, we reduce waste and streamline operations, allowing us to deliver services faster and more cost-effectively.  

• Enable Scalability: With better control over cloud costs, we can scale our cloud usage in a sustainable way, without the risk of runaway expenses. 

Key Components of a Campaign 

Each FinOps Campaign can be divided into five key components:  

1. Scope Definition 

2. Detailed Campaign Analysis 

3. Savings Potential 

4. Collaboration with Teams 

5. Monitor Progress and Maximize Savings 

   
   

Each component is necessary to perform a successful FinOps Campaign. Additionally, we advise following the given order to make the most out of your campaign.  

Scope Definition 

Usually, there are various optimization potentials within the cloud utilization of a company. When starting usage optimization, it is therefore of utmost importance to prioritize key levers. This means focusing on optimizations that potentially result in the highest savings and are easily realizable. This can happen through team discussions, where engineers and finance teams flag inefficiencies, by identifying high-cost trends in cloud spending reports, or by leveraging automated recommendations from tools like Azure Advisor, AWS Trusted Advisor, or GCP Recommender. The greatest savings do not help if they take more investment than saving money. Following this, we suggest analyzing optimization potential according to the following three main characteristics:  

1. What are currently / over the last year the highest cost drivers within the cloud? Group according to cloud service, usage family, and internal teams.  

2. Are there “low hanging fruits” such as idle resources, rightsizing recommendations, or weekend shutdowns that you can easily identify and have valid business impact? 

3. Do you know whom to contact to implement the optimization change or will this take much effort to find out?  

Once we answered the above questions and got an understanding of the main optimization potential, we can define the scope of a campaign by balancing out the impact and feasibility of the usage optimization. In most cases, the campaign is defined according to which cloud service and teams will be involved. Precise recommendations are not clear yet. 

Detailed Analysis 

After the scope definition of the campaign, the real analysis starts. With the cloud service and optimization idea in mind, we dig deep into the data to understand the status but also historical trend of the overall usage. We understand which factors the cloud service depends on. This includes the type of resources that are currently used and generally can be used within the service, the region in which the resources are running, or the utilization of the resources. Moreover, we investigate the pricing basis to understand the impact of possible usage optimizations. Is this service priced on usage hours, CPU utilization, MBits, number of calls, etc.? Once all these factors are analyzed and brought together, we can identify detailed optimization recommendations. Again, the recommendations will be elaborated based on their usability and feasibility. 

After this, a deep-dive evaluation of the selected resource follows. We scrutinize usage patterns, consumption metrics, and resource allocation to detect inefficiencies. For example, we might discover that a virtual machine consistently operates at a lower capacity than provisioned, suggesting that a more cost-effective option can be utilized. This type of insight forms the foundation for impactful cost-saving decisions.  

Savings Potential 

Based on our thorough analysis, we calculate potential savings on a monthly and annual basis. These projections are vital, offering actionable insights that empower teams to make informed financial decisions and strategically manage their budgets. Based on the optimization recommendations we identify, the overall savings potential of the campaign can be calculated. The savings potential is calculated as the current costs for the cloud service and resources that are in scope subtracted by the estimated costs you would have if you followed our recommendations. Numbers are then annualized to reflect the savings potential for one year: 

Monthly Savings Potential = Amortized Costs − Estimated Costs

Annualized Savings Potential = Monthly Savings Potential ∗ 12

These projections not only validate the impact of FinOps measures but also provide tangible evidence of cost efficiency improvements to management.  

Collaboration with Teams

After completing the analysis, we share the findings with the relevant service teams. By communicating clear cost-saving opportunities and optimization recommendations, we ensure that teams are aligned on the best course of action. This collaborative approach facilitates the effective implementation of our recommendations. We thereby pay special attention to ensure that the teams understand the positive business impact of implementing those optimization recommendations. At the same time, we also make sure that it is the responsibility of the teams to check if any change in their workloads that we suggest also makes sense to them and has no negative impact. All our optimization recommendations are solely based on the analysis of usage patterns and data available. Nevertheless, it is of utmost importance to involve the developers who have even more business knowledge.   

Monitor Progress and Maximize savings 

We utilize a Campaign Tracker to monitor the progress of each campaign. This tracker logs every identified savings opportunity, documents when and how the recommendations are executed, and records actual savings achieved (savings implemented by the team) and savings neglected (savings which couldn’t be implemented due a valid reason) over time. We usually track both savings achieved, and savings neglected to get a more accurate picture and understanding of resources that can be optimized, helping us improve future recommendations and avoid repetition. Additionally, the tracker serves as a platform for continuous communication and updates, ensuring transparency across the teams involved.   

Example Campaign Tracker

In addition to those five key components of running a successful campaign, below visualization summarizes useful hands-on tips for each step. 

Additional tips for Executing a FinOps Campaign

Finally, we want to provide a few examples for FinOps Campaigns which we already implemented in real-live scenarios that might help your company to optimize your cloud usage.  

Example Campaigns  

Campaign 1: Azure Log Analytics: This campaign focused on optimizing the use and cost of Azure Log Analytics services. We identified and recommended changes like reducing unnecessary data retention, improving query efficiency, and removing unused workspaces. By leveraging a dedicated cluster for multiple workspaces, we maximized cost savings on data ingestion – the primary cost driver. In our use case, this campaign resulted in significant cost savings by streamlining log data ingestion, the primary cost driver in Azure Log Analytics.  

Campaign 2: Deleting Unused Disks: This campaign targeted disks that had been unused for over 30 days, identifying opportunities to delete them and reduce costs. Recommendations were based on throughput and IOPS usage along with unattached status over the past 30 days. In our use case, the campaign led to reduced storage costs by eliminating resources that had been idle for 30 days, directly cutting unnecessary expenditure.  

Campaign 3: Premium SSD Downgrade: This campaign aimed at optimizing storage costs by downgrading unnecessary premium SSDs to more cost-effective alternatives. Recommendations were based on IOPS and throughput metrics over 30 days, suggesting a downgrade to Standard HDD or Standard SSD where feasible. As a result in our use case, this campaign successfully reduced storage expenses while maintaining performance, demonstrating the power of rightsizing cloud resources. 

HINT: Please pay attention that recommendation analysis always differs per campaigned cloud service.  

Conclusion: Take Control of Your Cloud Costs Today 

Cloud cost optimization is not a one-time initiative – it is a continuous journey that requires collaboration, visibility, and proactive decision-making. By implementing structured FinOps Campaigns, businesses can unlock significant savings, maximize cloud investments, and drive operational efficiency. The key to success lies in overcoming common challenges, leveraging data-driven insights, and embedding a culture of financial accountability within cloud operations. However, insights alone are not enough – action is required. Take the First Step: Analyze Your Cloud Costs Today.

Start by assessing your cloud spending using cloud-native tools like Azure Cost Management, AWS Cost Explorer, or Google Cloud Billing Reports. Identify underutilized resources, overprovisioned VMs, and unused storage to prioritize savings opportunities. From there, launch your first FinOps campaign, focusing on high-impact areas such as log analytics costs, storage optimizations, or VM rightsizing. Engage service teams early, validate recommendations before implementation, and track progress using a Campaign and Savings Tracker to ensure accountability – and always remember the five key steps for running a successful FinOps campaign!

Cloud cost management isn’t just about reducing expenses – it’s about making every dollar work smarter for your business. Start your first FinOps campaign now, track your savings, and transform your cloud cost strategy for long-term success.