As organizations mature their FinOps practice, their tooling must evolve too. This guide outlines the key questions to ask to ensure your practice has the right tools to succeed.
Whether you’re just building a FinOps practice or looking to refine an established one, it’s worth asking: Does my platform help my teams move from cost tracking to active efficiency management? And does it support the way my teams work?
We created the FinOps Buyers Guide to help you explore those questions. It introduces a framework for evaluating platforms based on real-world goals like engineering accountability, actionable insights, and prioritizes measurable impact.
Cloud Efficiency Posture Management (CEPM) shifts the goal from basic cost tracking to a more holistic approach: cutting costs by improving the overall efficiency of your cloud environment. Instead of surfacing what you’re spending, CEPM tools determine how efficiently your cloud resources are running. CEPM tools take it one step further by uncovering architectural waste like idle endpoints, over-provisioned services, or zombie workloads and turning waste insights into engineering action.
How can you tell if your FinOps tool is considered a CEPM tool?
CEPM platforms continuously scan for inefficiencies, surface hidden waste, provide remediation recommendations with context, and embed recommendations directly into engineering workflows. They assign ownership to engineering teams and track follow-through, turning cost signals into accountable action.
This becomes especially important in multi-cloud and SaaS-heavy environments, where complexity makes inefficiencies harder to spot. Without unified visibility and tailored insights, waste persists and engineering teams lose the clarity needed to act. When tools can’t adapt to your structure, accountability breaks down and savings slip away.
The most effective FinOps platforms help you uncover inefficiencies, embed action into engineering workflows, and support the way your organization operates. To help you identify whether your tooling is built for CEPM, we put together a focused guide. It outlines five key criteria every modern FinOps platform should meet, including:
If your tool falls short, don’t panic. We built this guide to help you reassess what “effective” looks like and take steps to raise the bar.
