From managing the rise of AI-driven business applications to aligning financial strategies with cloud policy, cloud infrastructure teams will be at the forefront of solving the revolving door of challenges brought on by new technologies in the coming year. In 2025, we anticipate significant advancements in AI governance, FinOps-CloudOps collaboration, Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM), and the increased use of automation to streamline cloud efficiency.
Here’s what the future holds for CloudOps and how organizations can prepare for what’s ahead:
1. AI governance becomes a critical investment area
Organizations are beginning to use new AI services and infrastructure options from cloud service providers (CSPs) as they re-write their business applications to integrate AI. However, AI brings a host of new challenges, questions, and opportunities – and CloudOps teams are at the forefront of addressing them. For example, many CloudOps teams get questions from business stakeholders such as:
Where are AI services currently provisioned?
How much cloud spend is associated with AI?
What data sources are being used to train AI models?
How aligned is the organization to emerging compliance trends?
In 2025, the importance of AI policies and guardrails will take center stage. CloudOps teams will prioritize implementing guardrails for GenAI services, including filters to avoid harmful content, restrictions on service provisioning to minimize wasted spend, and robust policies that prevent misuse.
2. FinOps will increasingly become a discipline of CloudOps
CloudOps teams are routinely challenged to drive innovation with the same amount or fewer people. They need to provision accounts, implement a governance strategy, and now, with the rise of FinOps, better manage both AI and cloud spend. The future of FinOps will focus less on reactive optimization and more on proactive guardrails in an effort to prevent waste and effectively govern AI-driven innovation.
CloudOps teams will own FinOps efforts alongside other responsibilities. Without the right resources, organizations could face cost overruns, overprivileged access, and time-intensive tasks.
3. FinOps programs will need to automate more to reduce cloud waste
2025 will push FinOps teams to do more with fewer resources. Increasingly, FinOps teams are partnering with CloudOps teams to align cloud policy and governance with financial outcomes. This means leveraging the policy automation and financial enforcements of cloud governance to proactively eliminate wasted spend. For example, FinOps teams will create guardrails that prevent use of expensive instance types, or allow for deployments in unapproved regions, as part of a more holistic governance model. Additionally, FinOps teams will configure their cloud governance platform to apply financial enforcements - e.g., if a developer exceeds budget in their development sandbox, they could be temporarily restricted from creating additional instances until the budget is cleared.
4.CIEM becomes a must-have capability for CloudOps and SecOps
Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) enables organizations to identify over-provisioned user and role entitlements across cloud providers. For example, many organizations struggle with implementing best practices for identity and access management (IAM), leading to users having unnecessary privileged or administrative access. As organizations grow their cloud usage, this problem becomes more important to solve at scale. CIEM enables organizations to identify roles with administrative access or the ability to escalate privileges, streamlining access reviews and allowing security teams to prioritize remediation efforts effectively.
5. Automation will be embraced to drive cloud efficiency
Gartner predicts that IaaS vendors will accelerate growth in 2025 and total spending will be in excess of $200 billion. Such growth means CloudOps teams will see immense pressure to automate and orchestrate more of their cloud governance strategy, requiring tools that will unify cloud cost management, IAM, compliance, and policy orchestration. AI services will drive some of this growth, prompting new software development initiatives to integrate AI into existing applications or reimagine how apps function with AI as a foundational technology. Consequently, automating account provisioning -- an essential step for launching new software projects -- will become essential for CloudOps teams striving to keep pace with business demands. Platforms that consolidate multiple tools and use cases will see the greatest potential for automation and efficiency.
The convergence of FinOps and CloudOps, the rise of AI governance, and the adoption of automation practices will shape how organizations thrive in 2025. By addressing challenges like cloud cost management, IAM, and proactive guardrail implementation, CloudOps teams can drive innovation with confidence and efficiency.
In the year ahead, success will depend on aligning financial and operational priorities, and staying ahead of industry trends. With these strategies in place, organizations can unlock scalable cloud governance and turn complexity into opportunity, laying the groundwork to lead in the era of AI-driven cloud operations.
