Control technology spend
Cloud, SaaS and AI bills grow with use, and the budget is under review. The work is to see where the money goes, cut what is unused, put limits on what grows, and defend the budget that is left.
5 decisions make up this job
- 1
See where the money goes
Give every cloud and SaaS cost an owner. Map spend to a standard taxonomy such as TBM so the figures compare from year to year.
- 2
Cut what is unused
Rightsize or switch off idle cloud resources, retire duplicate applications, and drop unused licenses at renewal.
- 3
Commit or stay flexible
Commitments and reserved capacity lower unit prices but lock in volume. Model staying, switching and renegotiating from your own contract terms.
- 4
Limit what grows with use
AI and data platforms bill per token, query or credit. Set budgets, alerts and routing rules before usage grows.
- 5
Show costs or charge them
Decide between showback and chargeback, and how shared costs are split between business units.
Trench Notes on this job
Each page sets out the steps and the documents, and practitioners add what they learned doing it.
- Building an IT budgetPublishes February 26, 2027
- Cutting AWS costsPublishes November 2, 2026
- Starting a FinOps practicePublishes January 22, 2027
- Cutting Kubernetes costsPublishes February 18, 2027
- Cutting Snowflake costsPublishes February 22, 2027
- Controlling LLM and generative AI costsPublishes January 21, 2027
- Running application rationalizationPublishes November 11, 2026
- Consolidating IT vendorsPublishes January 26, 2027
- Setting up IT chargeback or showbackPublishes February 24, 2027
- Bringing workloads back from the cloudPublishes January 25, 2027
- Setting IT KPIsPublishes January 14, 2027
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