If you’re responsible for managing your enterprise’s technology services and assets, you’re tasked with the nearly impossible job of navigating a web of fast-moving and constantly changing cost domains. Between volatile cloud spend, runaway AI costs, expanding mobility, and mind-blowing telecom price jumps, IT leaders are getting squeezed from all sides.
Much of this complexity still lacks true financial accountability, which is why FinOps has become essential. The framework gives teams a clear way to share ownership and stay on top of costs continuously, and platforms and automation help accelerate that at scale. Enterprises have been leveraging FinOps for years now with great success – companies using Tangoe’s FinOps-certified platform save up to 40% on their cloud costs – but the framework’s principles can be applied across the board.
If you’re only using FinOps for cloud, you’re overlooking a massive opportunity to tighten costs, increase efficiency, and save exponentially across your entire IT ecosystem. Keep reading to learn how to scale FinOps success across every corner of your organization.
Not familiar with FinOps? Click here for an overview of the framework.
FinOps for Cloud: Just the Beginning
FinOps began in the cloud for a reason: it’s dynamic, consumption-based, and financially turbulent by design. Resources spin up and down, usage shifts by the hour, and costs fluctuate in near real-time. Today, roughly 90% of companies struggle to optimize cloud costs, and nearly one-third of IT leaders waste half their cloud spend.
FinOps brings the structure organizations are starved for, establishing shared ownership between cloud cost management stakeholders, connecting cloud usage to real financial outcomes, and replacing static budgeting with real-time visibility and continuous optimization.
In practice, this involves a few things.
- Accurate cost allocation by team, application, or business unit
- Rightsizing workloads to actual demand
- Eliminating idle and/or abandoned resources
- Optimizing commitments and reserved capacity
- Enforcing policies for provisioning, tagging, and usage
Together, these capabilities measurably reduce cloud spend and ensure every dollar aligns to business value. Your team becomes part of the top 10% that isn’t up to their eyeballs in manual work and reactive practices, working smarter and more confidently with clear visibility into what’s being consumed and why.
FinOps for AI: Taming the Wild Cost Frontier
With over 80% of executives saying they’re stumped on how to manage the cost complexity of AI, FinOps emerges as a purpose-built framework for governing this foreign spending territory.
The model enables organizations to:
- Assign clear ownership of AI spend (by team, project, or business unit)
- Tag and track GPU hours, API usage, and storage and data transfer consumption so every dollar is traceable.
- Normalize and categorize AI costs separately from regular cloud so AI investments don’t “get lost” in the noise.
- Enforce policies and guardrails around experimentation and model deployment to prevent runaway costs before they happen.
AI redefines technology cost complexity, and FinOps redefines how that complexity is controlled.
Learn more about FinOps for AI in these blogs:
- FinOps For AI: Can We Avoid the Mistakes Of The Cloud Era?
- AI Cost Chaos: How to Control Your Cloud Budget Beyond Reactive Fixes
- AI Cost Optimization: How to Drive Innovation Without Driving Up Your Cloud Bill
FinOps for Mobility: Making Mobile Spend Predictable at Scale
Between corp-liable and BYOD programs, roaming, multi-SIM devices, stipends, and security, mobility is one of the most complicated areas of technology expense management today. In fact, 100% (yes, all) companies surveyed recently by Tangoe say they’re struggling in this area. A big part of the problem is fragmented financial responsibility. It’s nearly impossible to optimize when you don’t know who’s using what, who’s paying for it, or whether it’s still delivering value.
With FinOps, mobility goes beyond “managing devices” and starts being about real usage, real accountability, and real value:
- Visibility into every line and device so you know which devices are active, who they belong to, and which are sitting idle but still showing up on the bill.
- Clear eligibility rules for plans, devices, and stipends so not everyone ends up on the most expensive plan and stipends match real roles and needs.
- Plans that match how people actually use their phones vs. blanket (e.g.; unlimited) plans that drive up costs.
- Shared accountability across teams so mobility spend is no longer “everyone’s problem and no one’s ownership.”
Inactive lines are eliminated faster. Plans align more closely with actual behavior. Mobility becomes one less thing you need to worry about, and a huge source of hidden waste uncovered.
FinOps for Telecom: Bringing Order to Network Spend
Global carriers, complex contracts, legacy services, billing inconsistencies, and incomplete inventory data create a telecom environment where waste thrives undetected. Overall, enterprises overspend on their telecom services by an average 30%.
FinOps brings real-time financial control to what’s traditionally been a very reactive space. Teams get a controlled, auditable, and strategically governed network cost structure that supports modernization instead of fighting it.
FinOps introduces:
- Clear ownership of spend by domain and by team
- Frequent cost review cadences (weekly, not quarterly)
- Shared visibility between IT, finance, and the business
- Agreed-upon policies for what’s allowed, what’s not, and why
- Ongoing optimization as a habit, as opposed to a one-time project
When the framework works as intended, you’re no longer waiting until the end of the quarter to look at costs, relying on one-off audits, or discovering problems after they’ve already grown. As telecom pricing volatility increases, especially in legacy environments, this discipline becomes non-negotiable.
Tired of trudging through thousands of line items? A managed service operationalizes FinOps at scale. Tangoe’s telecom expense management services and support turn fragmented, hard-to-use data into clear, actionable insight so your team can focus more on strategy instead of cleanup.
Final Note
As work becomes more distributed, markets more volatile, and innovation more critical, FinOps has evolved from a cloud-exclusive practice into a financial operating model for the entire IT estate. It was estimated that companies using FinOps tools and practices saved $20B in 2025 alone.
See the power of full FinOps optimization with a demo of Tangoe One.