Managed FinOps - Cloud Cost Optimisation
Claranet's Managed FinOps service gives you the visibility, governance and expert guidance to control cloud spend on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, so every pound of cloud investment counts.
Challenges we solve
Cloud costs have a habit of creeping up. These are the problems we hear most often from organisations wrestling with their cloud bill.
No visibility into what you're actually spending
Your cloud bill lands each month and nobody can tell you where the money went. Cost data is fragmented across accounts, teams, and providers — making informed decisions almost impossible.
Waste you know exists but can't pin down
Idle resources, oversized instances, orphaned storage — you suspect they're there, but without the right tooling and expertise, identifying and eliminating waste is a full-time job nobody has capacity for.
Optimisation models you're not leveraging
Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, Spot pricing, start-stop policies — the options are powerful but complex. Getting them wrong can cost more than doing nothing at all.
No one owns cloud cost accountability
Finance wants reporting. Engineering wants freedom. The board wants forecasts. Without a dedicated FinOps function bridging these worlds, cloud governance falls between the cracks.
What is FinOps?
FinOps (Financial Operations) is the practice of bringing financial accountability to the variable spend model of cloud. It combines people, process and technology, and brings finance, engineering and business teams together, so cloud spend is visible, owned and tied to business value. In practice, that means knowing who is spending what and why, removing waste, using commitment-based discounts well, and keeping those controls in place as your cloud estate changes.
FinOps is a discipline rather than a product. Tooling helps, but results depend on the people and processes around it.
What is Managed FinOps?
Managed FinOps is Claranet's service for running that practice alongside your team. A dedicated team of cloud financial specialists works with your organisation to bring clarity, control and continuous improvement to your spend on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. We use CloudHealth by VMware, a third-party cloud management platform, for cost visibility, policy automation and reporting. We don't just hand you a dashboard and walk away.
The service operates across three iterative phases. First, we Inform — giving you full visibility into where your money goes, with cost allocation, tagging governance, and clear reporting. Then we Optimise — identifying waste, rightsizing resources, and leveraging commercial models like Reserved Instances and Savings Plans. Finally, we Operate — embedding continuous cost governance so your organisation stays on top of spend as your cloud estate evolves.
Whether you're running workloads on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, this service scales with you. It's designed for organisations that are past the experimentation phase and need their cloud investment to start delivering measurable value. For organisations running primarily on AWS, our dedicated AWS Cloud Cost Management & Billing service applies this same approach with AWS-specific tooling and reporting. If you run primarily on Microsoft Azure, our Microsoft Azure Cloud Billing service does the same for your Azure estate.
Key Benefits
- Full cost visibility across all cloud accounts and providers
- Expert-led rightsizing and waste elimination
- Reserved Instance and Savings Plan management
- Tagging governance and compliance enforcement
- Regular reviews with a dedicated FinOps consultant
- Automated alerts when spend exceeds defined thresholds
Claranet at a glance
Service tiers
Two tiers designed to match the maturity of your FinOps practice — from getting started to running a fully managed programme.
Standard
Ideal for organisations taking their first steps with cloud cost management.
- CloudHealth platform access and dashboards
- Quarterly business reviews
- Rightsizing and waste analysis reports
- Cost allocation and tagging recommendations
- Email and Microsoft Teams support
Enhanced
A fully managed FinOps programme with a dedicated consultant and proactive governance.
- Monthly reviews plus weekly touchpoints
- Dedicated FinOps consultant
- Power BI dashboards and custom reporting
- Reservation and Savings Plan management
- Tagging compliance and governance policies
- Budget implementation and threshold alerting
- Licensing reviews and ad-hoc reporting
Technical capabilities
Under the bonnet, here's what powers your Managed FinOps service.
CloudHealth by VMware
Your cost management platform — a Gartner-recognised leader. CloudHealth ingests billing data from AWS, Azure, and GCP, providing unified dashboards, automated policy enforcement, and deep analytics across your entire multi-cloud estate.
Rightsizing and waste analysis
We identify underutilised compute, oversized instances, idle load balancers, and orphaned storage volumes. Every recommendation comes with projected savings so you can prioritise what to act on first.
Reservation and commitment management
Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, and Spot pricing — we manage the full spectrum of commercial models to reduce your effective compute rate without locking you into rigid commitments.
Tagging governance and compliance
Untagged resources are invisible resources. We implement and enforce tagging policies that drive accurate cost allocation, enable showback and chargeback, and give business units ownership of their own spend.
Automated threshold alerting
Budget thresholds trigger automated alerts before you overshoot. We configure spend anomaly detection and escalation paths so the right people know about cost spikes before they become budget surprises.
Power BI and custom reporting
For Enhanced tier customers, we build bespoke Power BI dashboards tailored to your reporting requirements — from board-level summaries to team-level breakdowns — with data refreshed and maintained by our FinOps team.
How we work: Inform, Optimise, Operate
Our iterative approach moves your organisation from reactive cost management to proactive cloud financial governance.
Phase 1: Inform
We start with visibility. Onboard your cloud accounts into CloudHealth, implement tagging standards, build cost allocation models, and create the dashboards your teams need to understand where every pound is going.
Phase 2: Optimise
With clear data in hand, we identify savings opportunities. Rightsizing, reservation management, waste elimination, start-stop scheduling — each recommendation is prioritised by impact and effort.
Phase 3: Operate
Cost governance becomes business as usual. Continuous monitoring, regular reviews, governance policies, and budget controls ensure your cloud spend stays optimised as your estate grows and evolves.
Cloud partnerships and accreditations
Backed by the partnerships and certifications that underpin trusted cloud management.
How a FinOps assessment cut Lush’s Google Cloud consumption
See it in practice. A Claranet FinOps assessment of Lush’s Google Cloud environment reduced its cloud consumption by $180,000 per annum.
Ready to take control of your cloud spend?
Whether you're looking for visibility into where your money goes or a fully managed FinOps programme, we'll help you get there. Let's talk.
Or call us on 0330 390 0507
FinOps FAQs
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FinOps (Financial Operations) is the practice of bringing financial accountability to the variable spend model of cloud. It combines people, process and technology, and brings finance, engineering and business teams together so cloud spend is visible, owned and tied to business value.
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With Claranet, the Standard tier includes CloudHealth platform access and dashboards, quarterly business reviews, rightsizing and waste analysis reports, cost allocation and tagging recommendations, and email and Microsoft Teams support. The Enhanced tier adds a dedicated FinOps consultant, monthly reviews with weekly touchpoints, Power BI dashboards and custom reporting, reservation and Savings Plan management, tagging compliance and governance policies, budget implementation and threshold alerting, and licensing reviews.
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It starts with visibility through cost allocation and tagging, then identifies waste such as idle, oversized or orphaned resources, uses commercial models such as reservations and Savings Plans, and sets governance so improvements last. We don't promise a fixed saving; results depend on your estate.
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Cloud cost management is the set of activities and tools used to track and reduce spend. FinOps is the wider practice, adding shared accountability across finance, engineering and the business, and continuous improvement.
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Managed cloud runs your cloud operations. Managed FinOps manages your cloud costs and financial governance. The two complement each other.