CloudTech Talks

Catch up with the Part 2 of disucssion with Rishi Ghai, Google.

You'll hear the answers for,

1. How can we overcome the cost impact of multi-region, cross-region egress costs?
2. What should we watch out for regarding GKE Autoscaling?
3. Your take on the secret cost of Managed Services – Best ways to reduce the hidden cost?
4. How can we easily track and visualize our most heavily utilized GCP resources across the entire organization?

Dont miss the quick rapid-fire session towards the end!

Catch up with Rishi Ghai, FinOps Lead, GSD, Google Cloud Consulting, on this episode. Some of the key topics discussed are,

• Native GCP Capabilities: What are the latest built-in GCP FinOps features every team should know about and configure immediately?
• FinOps for Agentic AI: What features GCP is coming up with on this area?
• Tokenomics in Practice: Beyond the buzzword, what is the go-to strategy to monitor, optimize, and control LLM token spend?
• The Biggest Bill Drivers: Which GCP services sneakily drive up costs the fastest—and what are the quickest ways to cut them down?
• CUD Strategy: When should you lock into Resource-based CUDs versus Spend-based CUDs to maximize discounts without painful lock-in?
• De-risking Spot VMs: How can engineering teams capture up to 91% savings on Spot VMs without suffering from downtime and preemption?

What happens when you take the financial discipline of Cloud FinOps and expand it across the entire enterprise technology portfolio? In this episode, we sit down with Vineet to explore the evolution of Enterprise FinOps—a strategic framework that bridges the gap between technology investments and measurable business outcomes.

Vineet breaks down core frameworks from his book.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Enterprise vs. Traditional Cloud FinOps: Why managing public cloud bills is only the tip of the iceberg, and how Enterprise FinOps expands across the full IT spectrum.
• The RTI 360 Model: Structuring total technology spend across Run, Transform, and Innovate to balance operational maintenance with disruptive growth.
• Taming SaaS and Licensing Creep: Strategies to bring decentralized SaaS subscriptions, vendor platforms, and software licensing under cohesive governance.
• FinOps in the On-Premises Data Center: Practical ways to apply cloud-native financial accountability and unit economics to legacy infrastructure.
• Labor and Outsourcing Optimization: Extending FinOps rigor to third-party services, vendor contracts, and staff augmentation.
• CFO-CIO Business Alignment: Breaking open the IT "black box" to build shared financial language, governance, and executive trust.
• The "IT Value Delivered" (IVD) KPI: A deep dive into Chapter 8’s composite metric designed to demonstrate direct return on technology investments to the boardroom.
• Decision-Making via Mental Models: How applying mental models helps tech leaders overcome cognitive biases and make smarter capital allocation decisions.

Listen now to learn how to operationalize total cost accountability, optimize every IT dollar, and align your technology strategy directly with business value.

Join Anirudha Choudhury as we explore how to align Procurement and FinOps teams to combat "silent budget killers," cure SaaS sprawl, and optimize your multi-cloud economics. Key Takeaways,

• The "Buy vs. Build" Dilemma: Balance internal maintenance and operational costs against SaaS purchase prices and negotiation leverage.
• Aligning Procurement & FinOps: Bridge the gap between contract terms and unit cost efficiency through early cross-team collaboration.
• Curbing SaaS Sprawl: Continuously monitor software license utilization to identify and eliminate wasted spend on forgotten tools.
• Data-Driven Renewals: Build internal business intelligence dashboards to track real usage and negotiate stronger contracts.
• AI Cost Governance: Leverage AI to optimize cloud resources, but maintain human oversight to ensure the AI doesn't cost more than it saves.

This discussion includes,

• How to differentiate productive vs. unproductive spend and track real-time savings when cloud provider billing data inherently lags by 24–48 hours.
• Centralized vs. Decentralized FinOps CoE—which model actually works best for large-scale enterprises?
• How shifting the mindset to unit-cost efficiency is driven by initiatives like hackathons?
• How the FinOps framework must evolve to handle the unpredictable nature of AI tokens and GPU demand.
• The single dashboard metric you should be checking every morning to judge the health of your FinOps program.

We also had a Rapid-fire session towards the end! Tune in!

In this episode, Alessandro shared his experience in implementing successful finops practices for a large PayTech company - Nexi.

You will hear,

• Breaking-point that demanded cloud finops
• Evolution of finops at Nexi from state-zero at Nexi
• Tips to balance centralized finops poilicies with the local-market agility
• Gamification practices that helped Nexi
• Impact of data sovereignity and compliance demand on the cost optimizaiton across the regions
• Tips that helped onboarding new M&A without disturbing existing finops practices

It's a real finops success story! Hear it all that made T-Mobile to save a huge chunk of cloud expenses.

Our Guest - Shalini - FinOps Leader walked through,

• The key triggers that signaled it was "high time" for a dedicated FinOps culture.
• Actionable steps that moved them from cloud chaos to visibility
• Role of tools and dashboards
• Gamification practices that encouraged the teams
• Strategies for achieving executive alignment
• How T-Mobile is positioning its FinOps team for the wave of AI initiatives

Part 2 of 'Capacity Intelligence: Using Data to Drive FinOps Decisions' with Rohit Mishra is out to listen!

What can you know from the episode?

- Collaboration framework for Capacity Intelligence and FinOps teams

- Ways to ensure balance between performance and savings

- Reliability on AI for detecting/predicting capacity anamolies

- State of automation in capacity intelligence and its future

Capacity management has always been essential, but in the era of cloud, we need a smarter approach. The twist? Adding 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞.

Hear it from Rohit Mishra - Head of Cloud FinOps at Avaloq who has genuinely implemented and unfolded multiple benefits in his practice.

Key topics covered,

- Capacity Intelligence (CI): What is it, and how does it differ from traditional capacity management?

- Rightsizing: Why is it often reactive, not continuous?

- CI Data: What are the critical sources for a reliable model?

- Metrics Correlation: How do we link technical and business metrics?

- Savings Example: Real-time example on a direct FinOps decision driven by CI data?

Part 2 of our deep dive into Cloud Chargeback is here!

In this episode, Nikhil dives into:

• The common pitfalls organizations face when implementing chargeback models
• Actionable strategies to avoid these traps and drive adoption