FinOps (Financial Operations)

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2025: FinOps is now in vogue: How companies in Russia to rein in cloud infrastructure spending - TA opinions

The development of cloud technologies in Russia has led to a certain surge in the popularity of FinOps, a corporate process for managing cloud costs, which uses clouds with different types of charging for used resources instead of data centers with long purchase cycles. Market participants told TAdviser about this in September 2025.

Today we are witnessing a second wave of interest in FinOps in Russia (the first came in 2020-2021), says Dmitry Vazhenin, director of business development at Inferit FinOps (Softline Group of Companies). - Companies with foreign participation and individual enthusiasts have become pioneers, so there are organizations that have been systematically building FinOps practices for more than four years. Now IT structures of large holdings, banks, retail and industrial enterprises are actively joining them.

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According to the expert, while most companies are in the initial stages of FinOps implementation: they introduce basic accounting and cost analytics, but do not yet fully use forecasting and automated optimization. The logical next step will be the formation of full-fledged FinOps teams within organizations, Vazhenin is sure.

Lehman Tech architect Alexei Minaev agrees that interest in FinOps is growing among Russian companies: many CIO and CTO understand that without managing cloud costs, they quickly come to inefficiency.

Minaev claims that large Russian organizations (banks, retail, telecom) use FinOps principles, but often without formal methodology - these are, rather, processes for controlling and optimizing cloud costs. Medium-sized businesses are often limited to point optimization, and FinOps rarely reaches full practice.

In Lehman Missile Defense itself, FinOps has been used since 2020, actively developing its own tools around the methodology. Using the best FinOps practices saves up to 30% of the company's cloud account, said Alexey Minaev.

The trend of growing interest in FinOps is confirmed by Arenadata Data Strategy Director Najim Mohammad. According to him, the methodology has several obvious advantages:

• transparency of costs and return on investment,
• Reduce costs by eliminating duplication
• ability to reuse operating time and manage expenses comprehensively.

FinOps allows you to optimize (and often reduce) IT costs, but this needs to be seriously done and invested in time, resources, and finances, the company emphasizes. " DataRu But FinOps also has downsides. First of all, this is the need to build new financial processes within the company, says Najim Mohammad. There are mutual settlements between teams, standards and rules appear that did not exist before. This requires organizational change and readiness for transformation. Many companies face difficulties at this stage: attempts to implement "half" solutions without changing processes only increase problems, an Arenadata spokesman added in a conversation with. TAdviser

Aigul Artemyeva, Director of the Department of Economics and Finance of Operator Gazprom ID LLC (a subsidiary of Gazprom), attributed the following to the shortcomings of FinOps:

• Find expense drivers: User costs do not always reflect actual cloud consumption in some cases, the amount of costs is determined by the architectural characteristics of the product or user behavior.
• the need to develop analytics in management accounting.
• Employee training and workflow adaptation costs.
• purchase and integration of specialized software with accounting and BI systems.

The integration of FinOps into business processes implies the creation of a new culture of money and infrastructure management in the company, says Georgy Dzhabiev, director of business development at T1 Cloud. Introducing systemic changes is not easy, and it takes time to form and consolidate a new culture. For this reason, the synchronous implementation of all FinOps practices may lead to the fact that the methodology will not show itself to be effective, and the company will stop its development due to the difficulties that have arisen, the expert said.

Alexander Tugov, Director of Services Development at Selectel, noted that FinOps implies the need to form new business processes, create the necessary projects, appoint those responsible for resources and implementation with the allocation of a separate team for the subsequent implementation of accounting tools, as well as a strong CTO expertise in the financial component and technical features of the infrastructure. Selectel itself offers a number of tools for implementing FinOps: Shared Line servers, interruptible and frozen virtual machines, etc.

FinOps prospects in Russia look very positive, says Grigory Nemychenkov, director of the Cloud.ru client solutions development department. In the coming years, this methodology is expected to become the standard for effective cloud resource management for companies of all sizes. According to Nemychenkov, by 2025 professional forums and communities dedicated to FinOps are already appearing in Russia, and the practice of certification of specialists begins. Cloud.ru applies the FinOps methodology both within its own company and works out the tools of this practice for its customers, added the interlocutor of TAdviser.