State of FinOps Survey Reveals Key Priorities: Governance, Policy, and Cloud Waste Reduction

The latest State of FinOps survey underscores key priorities for practitioners over the next year, and I’m thrilled that Kion is well-positioned to support these needs with our comprehensive CloudOps approach. At Kion, we see our product as an enabler to create more value in the cloud, and our focus on governance, automation, and visibility puts us in a position to alleviate critical pain points and increase the value of an organization’s cloud.

Governance, Policy, and Waste Reduction

Over the next 12 months, the top priorities for practitioners centers around 1) FinOps governance and policy 2) waste reduction. Kion’s robust automation and policy enforcement capabilities help organizations streamline financial oversight, reduce waste, and enforce compliance seamlessly.

The future of FinOps hinges upon organizations having more automation. Kion’s policy engine allows organizations to create financial policy and combine it with automation, to ultimately have automated guardrails that govern your cloud and help prevent waste before it ever exists.

Managing Costs Beyond Public Cloud

More and more practitioners are being tasked with managing all technology spend, which expands beyond just cloud and into SaaS tools, data center costs, and private clouds. Rising five spots and into the top three, practitioners need to ensure they have full visibility into all spend. With FOCUS support, Kion is well-positioned to bring an organization’s total cost of ownership (TCO) into our platform to create better visibility and control for all spend. We expect this year will bring massive progress with SaaS vendors adopting the FOCUS spec, alongside advancements with open-source FOCUS converters. These advancements, alongside Kion’s early adoption of FOCUS, will allow our customers to manage all costs beyond just cloud.

Investment in AI Infrastructure Management

With 97% of respondents investing in AI infrastructure, managing cloud cost efficiently is more critical than ever. Kion provides automated budget enforcement, AI-driven insights, and proactive cost governance—ensuring organizations can scale AI workloads while maintaining financial control. We are uniquely positioned to provide both governance and visibility into your AI spend, and we look forward to growing the platform’s capabilities even further alongside our customer’s AI-driven needs.

Practitioners Being Asked to Do More

FinOps and CloudOps teams are under increasing pressure to manage growing cloud complexity. Kion’s integrated automation, governance, and cost management tools help teams do more with less effort, optimizing processes across the organization.

With these trends shaping the industry, Kion’s platform continues to align with the evolving needs of practitioners —delivering scalability, automation, and governance to drive financial efficiency across multicloud environments.

For more on how Kion solves governance holistically and enables a unified FinOps approach, read this blog.