💸Interactive Checklist
Cloud FinOps Maturity Checklist
Assess cloud financial management capabilities across visibility, optimisation, and governance.
20 items0%
Critical items (marked ★) carry 4–5× weight. FinOps maturity requires progress across all four domains — visibility without governance or culture change will not sustain savings.
Visibility & Reporting
You cannot optimise what you cannot see. Establish full cost transparency.
0/5
Cloud costs are tagged and allocated to business units, applications, and environments with at least 90% coverage.★ Critical
A centralised cloud cost dashboard is available to engineering and finance stakeholders with near-real-time data.
Unit economics (cost per transaction, cost per customer, cost per workload) are tracked for key services.
Anomaly detection alerts are configured to flag unexpected cost spikes within 24 hours.
Showback or chargeback reports are generated monthly and reviewed with business unit owners.
Optimisation & Rightsizing
Actively reduce waste and right-size resources to match actual demand.
0/5
Idle and underutilised resources (instances, storage, databases) are identified and remediated at least quarterly.★ Critical
Reserved instances, savings plans, or committed-use discounts are utilised for stable workloads, covering at least 60% of baseline compute.★ Critical
Auto-scaling policies are configured and validated for all production workloads with variable demand.
Storage lifecycle policies (tiering, archival, deletion) are enforced for all object and block storage.
Non-production environments are scheduled for shutdown during off-hours and weekends.
Governance & Accountability
Embed cost governance into cloud operations and decision-making.
0/5
Cloud budgets are set at the team or service level with automated alerts at 80% and 100% thresholds.★ Critical
A FinOps team or designated cloud cost owner exists with cross-functional authority (engineering, finance, procurement).
Cloud architecture reviews include cost impact analysis before provisioning new services.
Rate negotiation and enterprise discount programmes are actively managed with cloud providers.
Policy-as-code guardrails prevent deployment of non-compliant or oversized resources.
Culture & Process
Build a cost-aware engineering culture that treats cloud spend as a first-class metric.
0/5
Engineering teams have visibility into the cost impact of their services and include cost in sprint planning.★ Critical
FinOps reviews are conducted monthly with engineering, finance, and leadership participation.
Cost optimisation achievements are recognised and celebrated to reinforce cost-aware behaviour.
Cloud cost training or certification (e.g., FinOps Foundation) is available to engineering and finance teams.
Cost efficiency is included as a metric in engineering performance reviews and team OKRs.