A Deep Dive into the Latest FinOps Foundation Framework Changes and OpsNow’s Strategic Innovations

In this blog, we’re excited to share the major updates introduced in the 2024–2025 FinOps Framework by the FinOps Foundation which is the global authority setting the standard in cloud financial management. We’ll also highlight how OpsNow has swiftly adapted to these changes and is already delivering industry-leading features in line with the evolving framework.

As the first company in East Asia to receive official certification from the FinOps Foundation, OpsNow has been globally recognized for both its technical excellence and market leadership. Backed by a strong partnership with the FinOps Foundation, we continue to deliver services that are aligned with global FinOps trends.

Let’s take a closer look at how the FinOps Framework is evolving and how OpsNow is staying ahead with innovative, forward-looking solutions.

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FinOps Framework Overview and Update

FinOps (Financial Operations), which initially emerged with a focus on cloud cost management, is now evolving toward maximizing overall business value. In 2024, the FinOps Foundation significantly overhauled its framework to actively incorporate real-world best practices, and in 2025, it further expanded and refined the framework to strengthen its practical relevance and global applicability.

As a result of these changes, the definition of FinOps has been newly updated to: “Maximizing the business value of cloud and technology, enabling data-driven decision-making, and establishing financial accountability through collaboration among engineering, finance, and business teams.” Additionally, the structure of the framework has been simplified and clarified compared to previous versions, making it more intuitive and easier to implement.

While traditional FinOps focused primarily on cost control and financial management, the current evolution emphasizes efficient investment execution, tangible value creation, and the development of actionable strategies. The core of this update goes beyond redefining the fundamentals of FinOps and simplifying the framework structure—it also includes improved naming conventions for domains and capabilities, as well as the expansion of personas and capabilities to reflect the latest real-world FinOps practices.

As a result, FinOps is no longer limited to the goal of reducing public cloud costs. It is continuously evolving into a comprehensive approach that drives value across a wide range of technology spend areas—including SaaS, on-premises data centers, and beyond.

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Key Components of the FinOps Framework

[Illustration: Structure of the Revised 2025 FinOps Framework (Source: https://www.finops.org/insights/2025-finops-framework/ , Korean translation by OpsNow)]
On the left side of the diagram, the six core principles of FinOps are listed. At the top, various scopes—such as Public Cloud, SaaS, Data Center, Licensing, AI, and Custom—are displayed. In the center, the core personas directly involved in FinOps, along with the allied personas who support and collaborate, are organized. At the bottom, specific capabilities are grouped under four main domains.

The FinOps Framework is designed as an operational model composed of principles, personas, lifecycle stages and maturity models, domains, and capabilities. It serves as a blueprint to help organizations establish and evolve their FinOps practices effectively.

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These are the key components and core concepts included in the 2025 FinOps Framework update.

1. FinOps Principles, the framework outlines six core principles that guide organizational culture and decision-making direction. These include collaboration between teams, business value-driven decision-making, a culture where everyone takes ownership of their cloud usage, accessible and timely data, centrally governed FinOps practices, and leveraging the variable cost model of the cloud. Each principle serves as a foundational value to inform and guide all FinOps-related activities across the organization.
   
   
2. FinOps Scopes are a newly defined concept that represent the range of technology spend to which FinOps practices can be applied. Beyond public cloud, they extend to environments with diverse cost structures such as SaaS, data centers, licensing, and AI workloads. By defining scopes, organizations can apply FinOps in a modular way, enabling consistent governance across both multi-cloud and on-premises environments—while also accounting for the unique characteristics of each. This approach supports more effective and scalable FinOps implementation across the entire organization.
   
   
3. FinOps Personas define the various roles within an organization that drive or support FinOps practices, categorized into Core and Allied personas. Core personas are the primary stakeholders who lead or actively participate in day-to-day FinOps operations. These include FinOps practitioners, engineering teams, finance, leadership (executives), procurement, and product/service departments. Allied personas, on the other hand, are specialists from adjacent domains—such as security, IT Asset Management (ITAM), IT Financial Management (ITFM), IT Service Management (ITSM), and sustainability—who collaborate with and provide guidance to the FinOps team. This persona-based model helps clarify responsibilities and fosters cross-functional alignment in FinOps execution.
   
   
4. FinOps Phases, the FinOps process is structured into three key phases that guide cloud cost optimization efforts: Inform → Optimize → Operate. In the Inform phase, organizations gather and analyze data on cloud usage and spending to gain actionable insights. Based on these insights, the Optimize phase involves planning and executing strategies to reduce waste and improve cost efficiency. Finally, the Operate phase focuses on embedding these improvements into organizational processes and culture to ensure sustained financial accountability. These phases are repeated continuously, allowing organizations to progressively enhance their FinOps maturity over time.
   
   
5. The FinOps Maturity Model assesses an organization’s growth in FinOps practices across three stages: Crawl → Walk → Run. In the Crawl stage, organizations focus on basic cost visibility and respond reactively to spending. As they progress to the Walk stage, they begin to implement process automation and establish collaborative structures across teams. Finally, in the Run stage, organizations achieve real-time optimization, with cost data fully integrated into business decision-making processes—enabling strategic, value-driven operations at scale.
   
   
6. FinOps Domains refer to the key outcome areas that organizations aim to achieve through FinOps practices. In the current framework, these are categorized into the following four domains:
   
   • Understanding Usage & Cost: The area that secures visibility into cloud usage and costs and derives insights
   • Quantifying Business Value: The area that measures and analyzes cost-effectiveness and value creation effects
   • Optimizing Usage & Cost: The area that realizes specific cost savings such as resource efficiency and automation, and fee structure optimization
   • Managing FinOps Operations: The area that stably operates and establishes FinOps organizations and processes and continuously improves them
     
     
7. FinOps Capabilities define the specific activities and functions required within each domain, with a total of 22 capabilities outlined in the 2025 framework. For example, in the "Visibility & Allocation" domain, capabilities include data collection and reporting, as well as anomaly management. In the "Planning & Forecasting" domain, key capabilities include budgeting, forecasting, and unit economics. Within the "Optimization & Efficiency" domain, capabilities cover architectural optimization, pricing optimization, and workload tuning. Lastly, the "Governance & Automation" domain includes policy and governance enforcement, invoicing and chargeback processes, managing FinOps tools and services, and providing FinOps education and training. These capabilities serve as actionable building blocks that enable organizations to operationalize FinOps strategies effectively across various functions.

In this way, the FinOps Framework has evolved into a systematic operational model that goes beyond simple cost reduction. It connects engineering, finance, and business teams, strengthens data-driven decision-making, and ultimately helps organizations maximize business value from their technology investments.

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Mapping FinOps Domains and Capabilities to OpsNow Features

OpsNow, which adheres to global FinOps standards, has proactively incorporated key capabilities from the latest FinOps framework into its product. The table below maps the core capabilities of each FinOps domain to the corresponding key features of OpsNow. OpsNow’s new features are designed to effectively implement FinOps capabilities, making it easier for domestic companies to apply FinOps best practices in their operations. This ensures that organizations can seamlessly integrate financial operations management into their cloud strategies.

OpsNow's features comprehensively cover the capabilities required in each area of the FinOps framework. From cost visibility dashboards to anomaly cost alerts, budget creation/tracking, policy compliance checks, and cost-saving insights, OpsNow supports customers by providing the latest FinOps best practices as product features, helping them enhance control and efficiency over cloud costs.

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Customer Value by Key OpsNow FinOps Features

Now, let's take a closer look at the specific value that each OpsNow FinOps feature provides to customers in practice. By utilizing OpsNow, companies can significantly reduce manual tasks, easily internalize core FinOps capabilities, and elevate their cost management to the next level.

• Time-based Cost Analysis (Time-based Cost Visualization): By visualizing cost data from a multi-cloud environment along a time axis, this feature allows users to easily identify daily/monthly trends and patterns. This helps analyze the reasons for cost fluctuations over specific periods and provides insights needed for seasonal budget planning.
  
  | OpsNow Provided Value and Use Cases
  
  OpsNow's customizable dashboards integrate and display multi-cloud costs from AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, Naver Cloud, and more, allowing for analysis based on various criteria. This makes real-time cost monitoring and reporting easy for teams. Such visibility is essential for implementing the 'Usage & Cost Understanding' phase of the FinOps framework and enhances cost transparency within the organization, strengthening communication and accountability across departments.

• Anomaly Cost Detection (Anomaly Detection): By leveraging AI, this feature analyzes cost usage data in real time to detect abnormal costs early. While the default anomaly detection features provided by CSPs (such as AWS, Azure, etc.) may notify users with a 1–2 day delay after the issue occurs, OpsNow provides real-time monitoring, immediately alerting users to signs of cost spikes, enabling proactive response.
  
  | OpsNow Provided Value and Use Cases
  
  A domestic company (Company A) that adopted OpsNow experienced a rapid cost surge when hundreds of servers were unexpectedly created due to a security incident. However, with OpsNow's real-time anomaly detection alerts, they were able to immediately identify and prevent significant losses. In this way, OpsNow's anomaly detection feature helps prevent budget overruns caused by cost spikes and significantly reduces the risk of cloud cost management by quickly investigating and addressing the root cause of the issue.

• Budget Setting and Management: The budgeting and tracking capabilities emphasized in FinOps can be automated through OpsNow. OpsNow allows organizations and projects to set and monitor budgets, while its AI-based forecasting feature suggests reasonable budget levels.
  
  | OpsNow Provided Value and Use Cases
  
  Company B, which adopted OpsNow's budget management feature, set departmental budgets and applied the recommended values provided by OpsNow based on past cost data to forecast the next year's expenses. This improved the accuracy of their annual cloud budget prediction from 80% to over 90%. Additionally, when expenditures reached a certain threshold, OpsNow sent automatic alerts via email, Slack, Google Chat, etc., allowing the company to proactively manage the risk of budget overruns. With this functionality, finance teams can easily monitor cloud cost expenditures and take action when necessary, greatly enhancing the reliability of financial planning and control.

• Policy and Compliance: This feature allows for defining governance policies on cloud resource usage and continuously verifying compliance.
  
  | OpsNow Provided Value and Use Cases
  
  OpsNow provides over 300 best practice policies related to cost, resources, security, and performance by default and supports the creation of custom policies, offering guidelines for cloud operations. For example, using policies such as identifying resources with missing tags, automatically shutting down unused resources after a set time, and detecting permission setting errors can help prevent cost leaks and regulatory violations caused by human error or neglect. OpsNow's Governance module applies these policy-based governance practices to AWS, Azure, and GCP environments, continuously monitoring resource status and sending alerts or triggering corrective actions in case of violations. This enables companies to implement internal controls and compliance for cloud usage, thereby securing the governance capabilities required by FinOps.

• Insights & Report Automation: OpsNow's insights feature analyzes vast amounts of cost data to automatically generate meaningful insights and optimization actions. Notably, it automatically generates and provides cost optimization recommendations, including identifying and cleaning up unused resources, recommending appropriate instance sizes, suggesting reserved instance/savings plan purchases, and improving inefficient storage costs.
  
  | OpsNow Offering Value and Case Studies
  
  OpsNow continuously identifies optimization opportunities and presents cost-saving factors in monthly reports, while updating new recommendations. In fact, OpsNow customers have seen significant cost reductions through these AI-based cost optimization insights. For instance, H, a healthcare company in the U.S., saved approximately 20%, B, a franchise company, saved around 25%, and the average cost savings across all OpsNow customers was 37%. In the best cases, remarkable savings of 65% were achieved through reserved instance optimization. OpsNow’s insight function automatically uncovers optimization opportunities that are hard to identify manually and supports their execution, delivering a high ROI in terms of cost savings compared to labor. Additionally, through the OpsNow Insight module, users can easily obtain analysis reports on costs and resources through a ChatGPT-based conversational Q&A, allowing them to automate regular, customized reporting for executives and stakeholders without the complexity of manual reporting. As a result, FinOps professionals can focus on decision-making, contributing to increased cost awareness and operational efficiency across the organization.

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OpsNow's Core Values Leading the FinOps Market

The core values that OpsNow provides to its customers, as it leads the implementation of FinOps in Korea, can be summarized as follows:

• Leader in FinOps Certified Platform: OpsNow is the first solution in Korea and East Asia to receive the FinOps Certified Platform certification from the FinOps Foundation, making it the only domestic service that meets the global FinOps standards. This recognition underscores OpsNow’s technology and execution capabilities, which are acknowledged worldwide. With this certification, customers can confidently entrust their cloud cost management to OpsNow’s proven FinOps tools, ensuring effective and reliable results.
  
  
• Quick Integration of the FinOps Framework: OpsNow has swiftly integrated the new domains and capabilities from the updated 2024 FinOps framework into its product features, such as anomaly detection and SaaS cost management. This allows customers to immediately leverage the latest FinOps best practices without the need for additional implementation efforts, naturally enhancing their FinOps maturity. Features such as anomaly cost detection, budget management, and governance — which are highlighted in the latest FinOps guidelines — have already been implemented in OpsNow, making them easy to apply in real-world scenarios.
  
  
• Multi-Cloud and Local Cloud Support: OpsNow allows users to manage the costs of major public clouds like AWS, Azure, and GCP in one place, with plans to expand support for additional CSPs in the future. While global competitors are primarily designed for overseas public clouds, OpsNow is optimized for domestic cloud environments and usage patterns in South Korea. In addition to supporting a Korean-language interface and documentation, OpsNow offers localized features like detailed cost classification (viewing costs by tags or departments), display of costs in Korean Won, and compliance with local regulations and legal requirements. This allows OpsNow to meet the unique needs of South Korean companies. With this support, domestic businesses can achieve consistent FinOps management even in complex environments with multiple cloud accounts and vendors.
  
  
• Realistic Cost Optimization and Proven Results: OpsNow delivers not just theoretical insights or listed metrics, but actionable insights and automation features that lead to real cost savings. As mentioned earlier, several of our customers have achieved cost reductions of up to double-digit percentages, and we have accumulated success stories, including an average of 30%+ cost savings and 30% operational efficiency improvement. Additionally, OpsNow offers a performance-based service model, where a portion of the savings from optimization is shared, allowing customers to implement FinOps without initial investment. This customer-centric approach ensures that OpsNow is focused on delivering tangible value and success for its users.
  
  
• Leading and professional support for the domestic FinOps ecosystem: The OpsNow team consists of FinOps specialists who provide professional support and consulting to customers. Beyond simply offering products, OpsNow actively participates in the FinOps Foundation community and contributes to the expansion of FinOps in Korea, leading industry trends. With this expertise, customers can rely on OpsNow's best practices and advice to navigate early-stage challenges, such as organizational culture changes and cross-department collaboration issues that typically arise during the FinOps adoption process. As a FinOps partner, not just a tool vendor, OpsNow supports domestic companies in establishing cloud cost management strategies that are globally competitive.

Conclusion
OpsNow is a leading solution that seamlessly integrates the latest FinOps framework into the Korean market, offering businesses enhanced insight and control over their cloud costs. With features like automated cost visibility, monitoring, optimization, and governance, OpsNow helps organizations foster a FinOps culture that maximizes the business value of cloud usage. Whether in complex multi-cloud environments or on-premises, OpsNow simplifies FinOps practices, accelerates cost management maturity, and ultimately boosts corporate competitiveness.

Thank you for exploring how OpsNow can transform your cloud cost management!

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Get In Touch

If you’re interested in OpsNow FinOps or would like to request additional materials, feel free to reach out to us anytime.

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Related Articles You Might Find Useful

• Part 1: psNow obtains Korea's first FinOps Certified Platform(FCP) certification
• Part 2: Global Solution? OpsNow FinOps is a better fit for your business
• Part 3: OpsNow FinOps, the optimal FCP for Korean companies public figure Authentication Solutions
• Part 4: OpsNow FinOps is changing the paradigm of cloud cost management with AI

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[Appendix] Key Changes from the Previous Version (2021) – In Detail

There are several significant updates between the initial draft of the FinOps Framework released in 2021 and the revised 2024/2025 version. Led by the FinOps Foundation’s Technical Advisory Council (TAC), this update was shaped over several months through direct feedback from practitioners. As a result, the framework has undergone a modernization of terminology and core concepts, as well as a structural reorganization. Below is a summary of the major changes:

• Changes in the definition of FinOps: In the past, FinOps tended to be mainly perceived as “assigning financial accountability and control of cloud costs.”* Now, the definition itself has changed to maximizing the business value of cloud and technology, and is placing an emphasis on value creation and efficient growth rather than simple cost reduction. In addition, it has been specified that the scope of FinOps has expanded beyond the scope called “Cloud Financial Management” to all technology fields that generate variable costs, such as SaaS, PaaS, and on-premises other than IaaS. In short, FinOps has been redefined as getting the most business performance for your investment, not just saving money.
  
  
• Expansion of Scope (Introduction of Scopes): In previous versions of the FinOps framework, the application scope was implicitly limited to public cloud environments. However, the 2025 update officially introduces the concept of FinOps Scopes, broadening its applicability across various technology spending areas. The scope now explicitly includes Public Cloud, SaaS, Data Center, AI, and Licensing, enabling modular and scalable FinOps practices across diverse IT environments. Whereas FinOps previously focused mainly on managing costs related to public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, or GCP, it now encompasses costs from SaaS applications like Salesforce and even on-premises infrastructure such as data center operations. In line with this shift, terms across the framework—such as domain and capability names—have been revised to remove unnecessary references to “Cloud,” making them more universally applicable (e.g., “Optimize Cloud Usage and Cost” is now simply “Optimize Usage & Cost”). This change reflects FinOps’ evolution into a holistic model for managing all forms of technology spend.
  
  
• Reorganization of Organizational Personas: The representation of roles involved in FinOps has been clarified, distinguishing between Core and Allied personas. Previously, FinOps teams and their collaborators were not strictly categorized, but the updated framework now clearly separates primary responsibilities from supporting roles. While the Core Personas remain largely the same, their names have been refined for clarity—"Engineering & Operations" is now simply "Engineering", "Business/Product Owner" has been shortened to "Product", and "Executive" has been renamed "Leadership" to better define the scope of each role. Additionally, Allied Personas have been expanded to emphasize functions such as Security, IT Asset Management (ITAM), IT Financial Management (ITFM/TBM), IT Service Management (ITSM), and Cloud Sustainability. This update reflects the increasing intersection of FinOps with various governance areas within organizations, highlighting the need for FinOps teams to collaborate closely with these departments. The framework’s "Intersecting Disciplines" capability further reinforces this cross-functional collaboration as a critical aspect of FinOps operations.
• Simplified domain structure: The upper domain classification of the FinOps framework has been reorganized from 5 to 4. The existing framework was divided into 5 areas such as “Cloud Usage Optimization”, “Cloud Rate Optimization”, “Performance Tracking & Benchmarking”, “Real-Time Decision Making”, and “Organizational Alignment”, but in this reorganization, some areas have been integrated and renamed. Specifically, the areas of Performance Tracking & Benchmarking and Real-Time Decision Making have been combined into the “Quantify Business Value” domain, and the areas of Cloud Usage Optimization and Cloud Rate Optimization have been combined into the “Optimize Cloud Usage & Cost” domain. In addition, the name of Organizational Alignment has been changed to “Manage the FinOps Practice”, expanding it to encompass not only organizational alignment but also the entire FinOps operation, such as FinOps evaluation and improvement activities. With this, the domain has been organized into four: Understand (Usage & Cost), Quantify (Business Value), Optimize (Usage & Cost), and Operate (FinOps Practice), making the “headline” of the business performance perspective provided by FinOps clearer. (For reference, the “Understand Usage & Cost” domain has long been recognized as the basis of FinOps for securing visibility, and in this reorganization, its name and role have not changed significantly and it has been maintained as a core domain.)
  
  
• Add and rename Capabilities: The number of capabilities in the FinOps framework has increased from 18 to 22, with changes focused on aligning the framework with current FinOps practices. New capabilities were added, such as "Licensing & SaaS" to manage external costs like SaaS and licensed software, and "Architecting for Cloud" to address cost optimization during the engineering phase. Capabilities like "FinOps Practice Operations," "FinOps Assessment," and "FinOps Tools & Services" were strengthened to focus on internalizing and expanding FinOps team capabilities. Some existing capabilities were consolidated, such as "Rate Optimization" and "Usage Optimization," now integrated under the Optimize Usage & Cost domain. Additionally, the term "Cloud" was removed from several capabilities to simplify the naming and make them more universal. As a result, 4 of the original capabilities remain unchanged, while the rest were either added or renamed, ensuring that the capabilities are more aligned with real-world practices and making it easier for practitioners to access and apply the information.​

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