As cloud maturity grows, FinOps is no longer operating in isolation. The discipline is expanding beyond its original scope of managing cloud spend to intersect with broader domains like IT asset management, financial management, IT service management (ITSM), software asset management (SAM), sustainability and more. This convergence has accelerated in recent months, but it was at FinOps X 2025 that the shift became evident.
Three themes stood out during the event: FinOps for AI, AI for FinOps, and FinOps evolving into Cloud+. While all signal the discipline’s evolution, Cloud+ is now being formally integrated into the updated FinOps Framework. To support this effort, the FinOps Foundation also announced a new strategic partnership with the ITAM Forum at the FinOps X 2025.Â
This blog explains what the Cloud+ era means in FinOps, what’s changing in the FinOps framework, and how businesses can prepare for this broader, integrated future.
The Evolution of FinOps: From Cloud to Cloud+
The FinOps Framework, first introduced by the FinOps Foundation in 2019, was designed to help organizations manage and optimize their cloud spend. But as cloud usage has matured and supporting technologies like SaaS, PaaS, and AI tools have become deeply integrated across the enterprise, managing spend is no longer just a “cloud” problem. It’s a broader technology financial management challenge.
This shift is reflected in the evolution from traditional cloud-focused FinOps to what’s now called Cloud+ approach: a more expansive method that extends the principles of FinOps beyond cloud infrastructure to include adjacent technologies and services.
The 2025 updates to the FinOps Framework formalize this transition. In addition to refining the original Principles, the updates introduce new Scopes, which is a way to group and manage technology spend across different domains such as cloud, SaaS, data, and hardware.Â
These Scopes help organizations apply FinOps practices holistically across multiple cost categories, rather than keeping them siloed within IT or cloud teams.
Together, Cloud+ and Scopes represent a strategic shift: from isolated cost control efforts to a coordinated, organization-wide approach to financial accountability and optimization.
Key Disciplines Now Intersecting With FinOps
With the introduction of Cloud+ into the FinOps Framework, new intersecting disciplines now help organizations achieve a more holistic and effective technology cost management strategy. These disciplines include:
IT Financial Management (ITFM)
IT Financial Management (ITFM) focuses on long-term financial planning, budgeting, and the allocation of fixed IT costs across business units. FinOps, on the other hand, is designed for the highly dynamic and variable nature of cloud spend. When integrated, these practices provide a more accurate and agile financial view.Â
ITFM brings structure and governance to budgeting processes, while FinOps adds real-time visibility into consumption and cost drivers. This combination supports better forecasting, adaptive budgeting, and a stronger connection between planned investment and actual usage.
IT Asset Management (ITAM)
Traditional IT Asset Management tracks physical and software assets throughout their lifecycle, but it often falls short in dynamic cloud environments where resources are created and eliminated frequently. By intersecting with FinOps, ITAM becomes more cloud-aware.Â
FinOps enables tagging, usage tracking, and cost attribution for ephemeral and shared resources. This makes it easier to validate inventories, detect orphaned resources, and manage hybrid cloud environments where asset visibility is otherwise limited. The partnership between the FinOps Foundation and the ITAM Forum reflects this strategic convergence.
Software Asset Management (SAM)
Software Asset Management centers around license compliance and lifecycle governance. FinOps complements this by introducing spend intelligence and utilization insights for cloud-hosted and subscription-based software.Â
This is especially important for managing SaaS environments, where licenses are easily overprovisioned or left unused. By applying FinOps tagging, usage metrics, and cost allocation, SAM teams can optimize renewals, reduce waste, and better align licensing with actual needs.
IT Service Management (ITSM)
IT Service Management governs how IT services are delivered and maintained, following structured processes like those in the ITIL framework. FinOps brings a financial lens to these workflows. For example, by incorporating cost data into change management and incident resolution processes, teams can assess not just operational risk but financial impact as well.Â
This leads to more cost-aware decision making. Integrating FinOps with ITSM also helps standardize how changes are evaluated, prioritized, and reported, ensuring that service delivery aligns with both performance and budget goals.
Technology Business Management (TBM)
Technology Business Management helps organizations understand the business value of their technology investments. It enables CIOs and finance leaders to communicate the cost, consumption, and value of IT services in business terms.Â
FinOps deepens this capability by providing granular, real-time cloud spend and usage data. While TBM offers a broad strategic view, FinOps delivers the operational data needed to inform it. Together, they create a more complete picture of technology performance, from high-level value streams down to individual workloads and services.
Sustainability and Green IT
Sustainability has become a strategic priority for many organizations. FinOps contributes to sustainability goals by identifying inefficient cloud usage and eliminating waste. This not only saves money but also reduces energy consumption and carbon emissions.Â
Practices such as rightsizing resources, optimizing storage, and limiting unnecessary data transfers align directly with environmental targets. As sustainability reporting becomes more mandatory, the integration of FinOps and Green IT, often called GreenOps, helps organizations track and improve the environmental impact of their technology footprint.
What Changed in the FinOps Framework 2025 To Reflect Cloud+?
The FinOps Framework received a major update in 2025 to reflect the growing scope of technology spend management. These changes mark a shift from managing only cloud costs to a more integrated, cross-functional approach.
Expanded Definition
The framework now emphasizes both cloud and technology spend, formally introducing the “Cloud Plus” era. This shift acknowledges that cost accountability must also cover SaaS, private cloud, on-prem infrastructure, and other IT domains, not just public cloud.
Updated Principles
Four of the original six FinOps principles were reworded to reflect a broader scope. Notably, “cloud” was replaced with “technology” in key statements, and accuracy was added as a requirement for FinOps data. These changes align the principles with the realities of multi-layered IT environments.
Renamed Domains and Capabilities
To reflect the expanded scope, two domains dropped the term “cloud” from their titles. Similarly, the “Cloud Policy Governance” capability was renamed to “Policy and Governance” to fit a wider range of use cases.
Introduction of Scopes
The most structural addition was scopes: contextual models that help organizations apply FinOps practices across different types of technology spend, including SaaS, data centers, and AI. Scopes support targeted improvement by linking capabilities, personas, and KPIs to specific operational areas.
Together, these changes make the framework more adaptable to how organizations operate today into full-spectrum technology financial management.
For a detailed overview of the framework changes, explore our blog: FinOps Framework 2025 Updates.Â
How To Adjust Your FinOps Strategy for Intersecting Disciplines
With FinOps expanding beyond just the cloud, your current strategies may need to adapt to support the new intersecting disciplines. Below are some helpful tips you can follow to achieve this:
Define Scopes around tech and spend profiles
Begin by identifying all major types of technology spending, like public cloud, SaaS, on-prem infrastructure, or AI tools. Then, map each category to relevant FinOps Scopes. For example, if you manage both cloud and SaaS costs, you might select the cloud infrastructure and SaaS Scopes.
Next, build supporting workloads for each Scope. In the SaaS Scope, this could include tracking license usage and eliminating redundant tools. Establish clear metrics to measure progress. SaaS metrics might include license utilization or cost per active user, while cloud metrics could track cost per workload or percentage of spend under commitment.
Bring allied disciplines into FinOps workflows
To support new allied roles in your organization, expand collaboration beyond just cloud and finance. Involve teams like ITFM for budgeting, ITAM for tracking software usage, and sustainability for measuring energy and emissions tied to cloud workloads.
Integrate them into core FinOps activities such as forecasting, usage reviews, and vendor negotiations. Set up ongoing communication channels (like shared dashboards, monthly cross-team reviews, or Slack channels) to regularly share cost, usage, and performance data.
Bringing these disciplines into your workflows strengthens accountability and ensures FinOps supports broader business goals.
Prioritize capabilities by Scope and Strategy
As you begin applying FinOps practices across different Scopes, you’ll likely notice that not every FinOps Capability is critical for your business.
Research different FinOps Capabilities and decide which ones are most applicable to your current needs. For example, if you’re trying to lower your SaaS spend, prioritizing Licensing and SaaS Capability can help you make improvements in this specific area.
Start small and build iteratively
While it can be tempting to try to integrate FinOps with all your allied disciplines at once, a more manageable approach is to start small and build iteratively.
Focus on one or two high-value integrations where you anticipate seeing significant benefits early on. As you experience improvements in your processes, you can then start to expand the number of Capabilities you incorporate based on the organization’s readiness.
Implement shared dashboards and KPIs
To help your business teams work more effectively together, create shared dashboards that help to highlight the key performance indicators related to your technology spending.
Make sure these dashboards remain relevant for each department and include essential metrics associated with their specific responsibilities and goals. This will help promote more transparency and promote a FinOps culture and mindset across the organization.
Conduct regular cross-functional reviews
Establish a recurring schedule (such as monthly or quarterly) for cross-functional reviews to align teams and track FinOps progress. These sessions should include finance, engineering, IT, and any newly involved teams like procurement or sustainability.
Use these meetings to share relevant updates, such as improvements in cloud cost efficiency, SaaS license utilization, budget variance, or forecasting accuracy. Celebrate wins across your Scopes, like retiring unused resources or increasing Reserved Instance coverage.
Also review areas that need attention, such as rising data egress costs or low license utilization. Collaboratively explore new cost-saving strategies, such as autoscaling policies, rightsizing instances, or vendor contract renegotiations.
Educate and train
Identify skill gaps in your FinOps team and design targeted training to close them. For example, you may recognize that there’s limited knowledge in cloud pricing models, SaaS usage analytics, or budget forecasting tools.
Gather input from each department to understand where training will have the most impact. Then, run department-specific sessions and make use of available resources like the FinOps Foundation’s training courses, certifications, or community webinars.
Ongoing education ensures your teams stay aligned with FinOps best practices and are equipped to manage evolving technology spend.
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