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The FinOps Foundation’s 2026 State of FinOps report found that 98% of organizations are now managing AI spend.

As FinOps expands beyond cloud and governance rises in priority, teams are being asked to do more than ever.

So how should your FinOps strategy evolve?

In this breakdown, Kion’s Tatum Tummins unpacks five key insights from the report and what they mean for strengthening your FinOps practice in 2026.

A video hosting company was spending six figures a year on Amazon S3 storage for about 10 petabytes of video content. They cut that bill by 70 percent through smart detective work and simple fixes. Here's what happened and what you can learn from it.

Problem Shows Up: S3 costs made up 40 percent of the company's total infrastructure spending.Most of their costs came from a storage tier called Glacier Instant Retrieval, which is supposed to be for files that rarely get accessed. But the retrieval charges were huge, meaning files were being accessed all the time.

What’s Going on: The company used a just-in-time system that only created video formats when someone requested them. This saved storage space since they didn't need to keep multiple versions of each video. They moved videos older than 30 days to the cheaper Glacier tier, expecting them to sit there quietly. But here's the catch: storing 1TB in Glacier costs about $4 per month, but retrieving it once costs around $30.

Finding the Root Cause: They turned on S3 Access Logging and ran queries in Amazon Athena to see which files were getting hit the most.The data showed that a tiny group of files, about 0.1 percent of the total, was responsible for half of all the retrieval activity. These were mostly marketing videos that were bigger, higher quality, and watched about 100 times more often than regular videos. Storing these popular files in Glacier was like putting your most-used tools in the basement.

The Three-Part Fix: First, they moved those 60,000 frequently accessed videos to S3 Intelligent-Tiering, which has no retrieval fees and much cheaper access costs.That cut their Glacier retrieval costs in half right away.

Second, they improved their CloudFront caching from 65 percent to 90 percent, especially in regions that were performing poorly. Better caching meant fewer requests made it back to S3 in the first place.

Third, they changed how their video packaging system grabbed data from S3, requesting bigger chunks at once (2MB instead of 256KB). This reduced the number of individual requests by 85 percent.

What This Means for You: Most cost problems aren't about the cloud being expensive. They're about mismatches between how you set things up and how people actually use it.

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Trusted Advisor improved its NAT Gateway check using a 32-day lookback and Compute Optimizer signals. This reduces alert noise and provides estimated monthly savings to help teams prioritize idle resource cleanup.

Governance improvement by Compute Optimizer: now auto-tags EBS snapshots created during automated cleanups for better traceability.

Redshift Serverless now supports 3-year reservations, offering up to 45% savings and payer-level sharing for higher utilization.

Read All AWS Updates

New Budget Bytes guides provide architectural patterns to prototype AI applications for under $25. These guides leverage the Azure SQL Free Offer to help teams maintain strict cost governance during early-stage experimentation.

Read All Azure Updates

No Updates this week :(

Read All GCP Updates

Idle resources don’t clean themselves.

If your FinOps team is still chasing owners, opening tickets, and manually reviewing idle EC2, RDS, or volumes- this session is for you.

Join Us for Session #2 of the Wiv.ai FinOps Fix Clinic: Automating Idle Resource Cleanup at Scale.

📅​ Date: March 23rd, 2026
🕗​ Time: 12pm EST | 6 pm CET

It’s a technical walkthrough built for FinOps professionals who want to automate repetitive workload safely and at scale.
Led by Yulia Perlis, VP FinOps at CloudZone, bringing hands-on experience across hundreds of cloud environments.

Learn How to make Cloud Cost Governance in your Organization using Incentives, AI, and Policy. We got Tatum Tummins, PM from Kion, talk about how to prioritize business value, the role of AI in FinOps, and real-life examples of successful cloud cost governance policies.

Listen on Apple Podcast

Listen on Spotify

You have dashboards showing every dollar of cloud spend. You have reports breaking down costs by service, team, and region. You can see exactly where the money goes. But your cloud bills keep growing anyway. This is not a data problem. It is a system problem.

Jill Ann Kay explains why cost visibility fails to drive change. The issue comes down to three structural gaps that stop insights from becoming action. Cost optimization needs three things to succeed.

Dashboards give you the data. But data alone does not change behavior. The real work is connecting those insights to the organizational structures that determine how teams prioritize and execute their work.

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Organizations throw away about 32% of their cloud budget on resources they don't actually need. You've probably seen those "top 10 AWS cost tips" lists floating around. The problem is they tell you to do everything at once without considering where you're starting from.

It's like telling someone to run a marathon when they haven't learned to walk yet.

Think of AWS cost optimization like building a house. You need a foundation before you add walls, and walls before you add a roof.

Stage 1 - Visibility: You can see where money goes

Stage 2 - Tactical Optimization: You can fix obvious waste

Stage 3 - Strategic Optimization: You can make big architectural changes

Stage 4 - Governance: You can enforce cost controls across teams

Stage 5 - FinOps Culture: Everyone thinks about costs automatically

Most companies are stuck between Stage 1 and Stage 2. That's completely normal.

Answer these questions honestly: Can you identify your top 5 spending services in 30 seconds? Have you acted on right-sizing recommendations in the last 90 days? Do developers consider cost during design reviews?

Check the full guide below

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There is no magic button that will cut your cloud bill in half overnight. But if you are tired of chasing one-time savings and want to build something that lasts, these nine rules from a FinOps Lead at AXA Group Operations will help you move from quick fixes to real cost control.

Stop chasing euro savings targets: This is the most important rule. Year one, you might save 20 to 25 percent of your cloud costs. By year three, getting 3 percent is hard because you already fixed the easy stuff. Think of it like losing weight - the first pounds come off fast, then it gets harder even though you are getting healthier. Your cloud spending works the same way.

Make it everyone's problem: Cloud costs are not just the FinOps team's job. You need buy-in from management, finance, IT, developers, architects, and users.Talk to people, share what you know, and help them understand why it matters.

Build FinOps into your deployment process: Most cost problems start before anything goes to production. Set rules that stop deployments if they do not meet your standards.

Build tools everyone can use: If you do something manually three times, automate it. Create shared libraries of scripts, queries, and documentation that anyone can use. Build learning paths for different roles so people know what they need to know.

Talk like a normal person: Terms like Savings Plans, rightsizing, and autoscale mean nothing to most people. Your CFO does not care about technical details - they care about staying in budget. Build simple scorecards that show grades like A, B, C, or D based on how well teams follow best practices.

The cloud makes your decisions bigger - FinOps helps you stay in control.

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Enterprise IT Operations & AIOps Transformation Leader

Passionate about infusing generative agentic AI for Enterprise IT Platform Ops optimization, Multi-cloud visibility with FinOps/GreenOps, AIOps CVE observability, API Integration with Ansible, Terraform workflows.

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Naming conventions is essential to avoid a Cloud mess.

Tagging is one of the core skills to govern Cloud Resources.

Cloud Governance is a core skill for FinOps.

Learn both in our course Tagging & Naming conventions with our discount code only for FinOps Weekly Readers.

Use code “FW2026” for 30% off in our course

P.S. Azure FinOps Course already started. Thanks everyone who joined there.

Together with CloudThrottle. Check their Cloud Budget Simulator