Cost optimization is not about cutting budgets blindly. It is about creating visibility, governance and operational discipline across IT and cloud environments.
In this episode of A CGI Conversation, host Derek Marinos speaks with Mark van Engelen and Scott Stanley about how FinOps practices help organizations mature their cloud operations through better governance, forecasting and cost transparency.
The conversation also highlights how organizations can evolve from reactive cloud cost management toward a proactive operational governance model that supports long-term scalability and innovation.
Many organizations already have access to effective cloud and FinOps tools. The bigger challenge is usually whether the organization has the governance model, cost ownership and operational processes required to use those tools effectively.
FinOps becomes more powerful when organizations look beyond individual cloud platforms and build a consolidated view of IT costs across cloud, SaaS, licensing and operations. Mark emphasizes the importance of moving away from fragmented dashboards and siloed ownership.
Scott Stanley highlights that when organizations can see the right data, cost ownership becomes much clearer. Better visibility helps product owners, P&L leaders and delivery teams understand how their decisions affect spend, forecasting and long-term sustainability.
The conversation makes clear that percentage-based savings are only one part of the FinOps story. For Mark, the broader objective is helping organizations establish a repeatable system that can adapt as technologies, platforms and business priorities evolve.
Scott connects FinOps to broader operational disciplines such as site reliability engineering, observability and AI-enabled operations. When organizations can anticipate and avoid costs before they appear on the bill, FinOps becomes part of a more mature operating model.
- Chapter 1: Establishing the FinOps foundation
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Derek Marinos
Welcome to A CGI Conversation, where we explore the trends, challenges, and opportunities shaping the future of business and technology. I’m your host, Derek Marinos. IT and cloud cost optimization isn’t about slashing budgets. It’s about building visibility and discipline into how IT environments are run, including cloud. When that foundation is in place, savings follow. Today, we’re unpacking that approach and how one Canadian investment firm applied FinOps principles to regain control, improve forecasting, and significantly reduce cloud spend without slowing delivery. Joining me are Mark van Engelen, who leads emerging technology at CGI in Western Canada, and Scott Stanley, a longtime cloud and FinOps leader. Gentlemen, welcome to the program.
Mark van Engelen and Scott Stanley
Thank you. Great to be here.
Derek Marinos
Let’s start with the pattern. Mark, when you walk into a cloud-heavy organization and assess it through a FinOps lens, what are you really looking for?
Mark van Engelen
I really look at their maturity level, first of all, because a lot of time around this is spent on governance- and process-related issues. We find it’s not really the tool sets that are the problem. There are many different tools available that can help in the FinOps space, so that’s not really the issue. It’s really about adoption and implementation of processes around FinOps. That is usually the gap. So, I look very quickly beyond the cloud, if they’re heavy on cloud, to how their IT cost governance is structured across the board. Do they have a single pane of glass where they can see everything together? Do they have a definition for total cost of ownership? Those types of things. How are roles and responsibilities organized? We find that is key. For example, I came into a client where they were about three, four years into their cloud journey, but they were still very fragmented on how they were organized. We helped implement some of the FinOps processes. We helped configure some of the existing tools. I got them a single pane of glass, and with that, they were able to find about 25% cost savings. But it’s really a matter of governance and process and maybe some tool configuration, but that’s not typically the issue.
Derek Marinos
So, this isn’t usually about reckless cloud usage. It’s maturity, like in many respects. Cloud scales quickly, but operational discipline doesn’t always scale with it. How common is that pattern across the organizations you’re seeing?
Mark van Engelen
It’s pretty common. Even if they have it under control for, let’s say, cloud, you can still see gaps or issues maybe with their SaaS or licensing costs, or new AI costs that are coming up. If they haven’t extrapolated those processes and governance to all those areas, there’s always room for improvement in that space. So, my go-to is thinking about FinOps at an enterprise level and having it across all systems. Make sure your processes are consistent. Otherwise, it may look good on the cloud side and like you’ve got it under control, but then there’s a gap somewhere else. That’s appearing because technology is constantly changing, right? And therefore, if you don’t have the processes and governance in place to be able to adapt to that, there’s always going to be a gap somewhere.
Derek Marinos
Yeah, and once you identify that maturity gap, the next question becomes how you engineer the foundation to close it. And Scott, once you understand that maturity gap, what do you change first or what would you change first?
- Chapter 2: Closing maturity gaps through data and accountability
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Scott Stanley
Yeah, I mean, so there are industry standards that are generally found across a software delivery lifecycle or a full delivery of any IT process. And in turn, a lot of what we look at is how are you addressing it today? As Mark said, maturity gaps are different from client to client. We very much focus on what’s going to deliver the most value back to the client. What are the biggest indicators of anti-patterns that we’re seeing? In a lot of cases, we try to make sure that we’re collecting data and observing that data and providing the right KPIs to the right stakeholders to make sure that we’re feeding back at the beginning of the process for P&L owners or product owners. That way, they can address those governance gaps that Mark was describing.
Derek Marinos
That’s interesting. And once that visibility was in place, how did it change the way teams forecasted, owned, or acted on the cloud spend?
Scott Stanley
Yeah, you’d be really surprised—a lot of our clients, once they see this data, it becomes very apparent to them and revealing that, they in turn need to take more accountability for this spend. Especially when you can identify teams that are more… I’ll say responsible on the RACI as opposed to accountable—you hand it back to the person who’s accountable. They immediately want to start to change this. And again, what you’ll see is, you know, the prediction of cost really benefits individuals like P&L owners, right? Because they need to be accountable for not just the revenue of what they’re building, but also for the overall cost and sustainability of the products that they’re developing. So that’s where it really starts to have a direct impact on that cloud spend. A lot more guardrails will be put in place and processes will be enhanced to ensure that, again, there is a predictable view of the costs prior to receiving the bill.
Derek Marinos
When we opened the show, we talked about that Canadian firm. And I’d love to circle back to that example that we’re bringing in here. Scott, can you just elaborate a little bit more about how we’re engineering accountability here?
Scott Stanley
Yeah, so in a lot of cases, we go in, and find the biggest opportunity for cost savings in here, right? Once we’ve identified that, then there’s obvious questions around, how did we get here? What are the anti-patterns that we’ve developed over time? And, a lot of companies struggle with that because they feel they have a very mature governance process. But when you reveal the data, it’s really hard to argue with it. So, we leveraged that data in the firm that we’re specifically talking about to show them that, okay, there’s a very high spend on their AWS costs or their cloud costs specifically. And, you know, we immediately saw, well, if you produce these instances as an example, you can find immediate cost savings. But the challenge was, if we make these changes, how does that impact the customer? So in turn, it starts to kick off a whole initiative to make sure that we are understanding, well, if we make this change, what is the real return on investment we’re going to see? Do we need to take away from our revenue drivers to achieve this, to focus on legacy cost savings? And what’s going to be more valuable? Is it going to be more valuable to do this in a year and achieve these savings? Obviously, in my opinion, the best time to start saving is now. But in the grand scheme, you have to move at the pace that the customer can support. We don’t want to get involved in competing priorities and take away from the revenue. We want to try to focus on the most optimal move of all the permutations that’s going to deliver the most savings.
Derek Marinos
And the cost reduction, the value that you’re talking about, is really important. Mark, from an executive standpoint, why does control matter more than percentage?
Mark van Engelen
Because from my perspective, percentages change, right? As I was saying earlier, technology changes over time. So maybe initially you can get a 20% savings on cloud, but then I have clients that switch from their current hyperscaler to another hyperscaler. So that 20% savings you had all of a sudden changes dramatically because you have to start from scratch with somebody else, right, with a different tool set and all those things. So, it’s really not about the percentage. It’s about having the system in place so you can capture those changes and adapt accordingly. So it’s more about the control of the process, more having the accountability clear, and understanding there’s a raft of tools that probably need to work together as well to give you that comprehensive picture. So the main focus is control, but it often starts with a percentage, right? You come in, well, help me save 10% on my cloud cost or 20%. But very quickly, they turn around and they basically say, well, how can you make this sustainable?
Derek Marinos
No, it’s true. It’s very much true. And savings are measurable. Control is strategic. Let’s zoom out for a minute. And Mark, at what point does FinOps stop being about cost, and start being about operational maturity?
- Chapter 3: Moving from cost savings to operational maturity
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Mark van Engelen
I think it’s as soon as you’ve produced some initial results, because then that justifies further efforts, right? If they try to go down the path and they can’t find any savings, then it’s a dead end. There’s very little executive leadership sponsorship and all those things, right? So, it’s very quickly getting some initial savings, but then turning the conversation to make this approach enterprise-ready, controlled, and across the board—not just for cloud specifically.
Derek Marinos
What changes structurally, Mark, when this approach truly sticks?
Mark van Engelen
It’s more of an integrated mindset, I would say, and integrated processes. People typically have siloed teams. They may have a data analytics team, an on-premises infrastructure networking team and a cloud team. And these FinOps processes bring that all together to show how these processes connect, where the touch points are. This therefore gives that better end-to-end enterprise view. So I think that’s the big value for them is having that whole end-to-end enterprise view on their costs.
Derek Marinos
And Scott, this is where site reliability engineering intersects. How do FinOps and SRE reinforce each other?
Scott Stanley
Yeah, so I mean, if you consider that a highly available product means you’re going to generate more revenue, site reliability engineering is really about high availability and resilience. It’s about making sure that you’re putting practices in place to be proactive in responses to incidents as opposed to reactive, which therefore means that you’re going to have less spend on the human side. If you consider things like a 15-hour outage, and the types of team silos that Mark described, often production support is at the end of the SDLC. They’re the team that has to go and address all these problems. They have, you know, to wake up at 2:00 in the morning and address all these. And that overtime cost and those outages have a high impact on your costs. So, site reliability engineering is really about observability. It’s really about capturing data metrics to help you enhance and improve your delivery process to ensure that you aren’t delivering bad code to ensure that you have that high availability and resilience. But interestingly, a lot of these best-in-class solutions out there are now adding in things like cloud cost management modules into their services, which allows you to have predictive cost analysis on your cost as you’re building and developing—before you receive the bill, you can see those costs. So, what we’re really trying to do is help our clients combine cost avoidance and predictive cost visibility together in a single pane of glass. So, site reliability engineering definitely lends itself to and is very symbiotic with FinOps. And once that foundation is in place—I’m curious here—where does AI start to enhance optimization?
Derek Marinos
Absolutely.
Scott Stanley
So, I mean, the dream is that your services will self-heal and will automatically stand themselves back up. And again, a lot of these tools offer AI capabilities that if they detect an outage, they can actually go in and execute processes to ensure that the services do stand themselves back up without, you know, alerting—obviously it’ll create an incident—but without waking up people at 2 a.m. because the issue can actually be resolved. Now, again, this is a very advanced state of reliability engineering and AIOps. It’s challenging to achieve, and a lot of our clients aren’t close to that maturity level. But that’s part of what we do here at CGI. We help our clients continue to evolve their practices, teaching them how to fish and adopt these future-facing approaches.
Derek Marinos
That’s interesting. And Mark, the old saying is, if the tools aren’t the problem, then what is?
Mark van Engelen
Yeah, we talked a bit about the governance and process, but what I wanted to highlight here is the vision, right? So there’s, for example, many different measurement frameworks people could be using—anything from technology business management to COBIT, FinOps Foundation. If you haven’t selected a proper kind of cost measurement framework, then there’s your first problem already, right? And the second bit, after you selected it, now it’s like, well, how am I going to do this? So what’s the process going to look like? What’s the governance going to look like? And which mixture of tools do I need to pull that all together to have FinOps in my organization across the enterprise? So I think that often when we come into clients, it’s like they haven’t really decided on that measurement framework even yet. They’re just starting to adopt tools, without that vision. So I think that for me is the first part, having a clear vision of, hey, I want to run this across the enterprise. This is the framework I want to use, which is aligned to the rest of how I run my IT. And that’s a really good starting point to filter out which tools you need and which processes you need to change and what governance adjustments are required as well.
- Chapter 4: Breaking down silos and reducing OpEx
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Derek Marinos
And most organizations already have cloud platforms and observability systems. So why are they still struggling?
Mark van Engelen
Because that’s very silo-based, right? So let’s say I have a multi-cloud environment and I’ve got some AWS and I’ve got some Azure and some Google. They all have their own cost management tools, but now I’m looking at three different dashboards and I can’t really stitch it together. And how does that relate to a business function? How does that relate to a service I’m providing as an IT organization? So that’s typically the challenge: okay, well I have all these bits and pieces of siloed information, but how does that actually stitch together? And how am I going to govern that? Because fragmented teams, fragmented processes and fragmented tools do not give you that end-to-end view of your enterprise or show where you can actually save the most.
Derek Marinos
Yeah. I know, that’s true. Scott, a little perspective on that as well.
Scott Stanley
Yeah, I mean, we see that, a cacophony of logos with our clients as they select different technologies. We often see that product owners have their own, cost center or budget, and their team will advise them that this is the best tool to use. But then a lot of these tools are redundant. They have overlapping capabilities. The licensing costs continue to expand as opposed to leveraging the opportunities to amalgamate these costs and get different tiered licensing, which will actually deliver reduced costs. Or doing different things like purchasing these through your enterprise cloud agreement, as an example, which gives you different advantages. These are all things that we take into consideration with our clients to help them map out what the best approach would be. So it’s not just purely about cloud utilization. It’s about the opportunities to save in all areas, including software licensing and human efforts. Because when it comes down to it, we’re talking about reducing maintenance cost. Because every CIO who’s out there, if you can reduce maintenance costs, it frees up budget and important resources to get after R&D, to get after other things that can help.
Derek Marinos
Is that as much a priority? I’ll open up to both of you. Very quickly when you walk in the door, most of the time you hear some of those maintenance budgets can be 70, 75%. “I’m handcuffed, help me here,” is often what you hear, right?
Mark van Engelen
Yeah, I would say, it’s really about OpEx reduction, right? Because as people have been switching more to cloud and getting more SaaS products, their OpEx has increased, while from a business lens, probably the CIO hasn’t added a lot of services, right? So the main question we’ve gotten from clients is—help me reduce my OpEx, because that then frees up other things. You’re right around the maintenance budget, though, because like a CIO typically spends like 70% of their budget on maintenance and technical debt activities. But those are typically project costs. But the main focus, I think, around FinOps is getting a handle on your OpEx, because people have just been adding in tools and not having the control around that. And therefore, they get a lot of questions around how do I reduce my OpEx. And these FinOps processes help give that transparency, help give back control where OpEx may have skyrocketed without those controls, proper controls in place. So, this is for me the right area of getting your OpEx under control properly and consistently.
Scott Stanley
And just to color a little bit more on what Mark’s saying: it’s the transition into a scalable solution like cloud, right? It’s now, it’s on demand. The ability to observe these things, it’s happening much more rapid fire. And specifically staying on OpEx, there are actually creative ways to amortize in the cloud and actually make it more of a CapEx spend. But that’s a very unique situation, right? There are very specific scenarios where that works and where that’s beneficial. So really what you need to focus on is, how do you truly build the scale? The promise of cloud is that you only pay for what you use. But the truth of the matter is a lot of organizations really have adopted cloud in a very experimental way or not a consistent way. Their teams go, they learn, they stand things up, they structure it. Is it well architected? Is it aligning to best practices? And is it truly scaling properly? Because in a lot of cases, the demand, the customer demand, invokes its own anti-patterns—we’ll see right shifting and Conway law—start to apply within the teams. And that’s when the teams start to bloat out and be created based on the needs of the product, as opposed to ensuring that you’re doing things correctly and building an intelligent and right-sized product where you can keep your teams lean and efficient and reduce the human cost, which is exactly the intention of what these services are intended to do. But in a lot of cases, people are treating the cloud like a data center. And that’s why you start to see object costs start to skyrocket.
- Chapter 5: Key takeaways for leaders
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Derek Marinos
That’s really interesting. Thank you for your perspective on that. We’ve come to the part of the program where I’d like to get some key takeaways from each of you, rapid fire—some really good short bites. Mark, I’ll start with you. What’s the one decision leaders should make this quarter? I think making sure that they are consciously taking control of their costs across the enterprise.
Mark van Engelen
So really looking at it holistically and not just leaving it in the silos where it’s typically at. Okay, and Scott, what’s the one discipline teams tighten immediately? I think it’s really accountability and it’s ensuring that each service as you develop it, everyone’s aware of what they’re accountable for. That’s one thing we start to see. When you introduce FinOps into most organizations, what you immediately start to see is people cleaning up the house. Like, yes, they’re coming over.
Derek Marinos
Let’s go and actually start to decommission those things that we stood up and orphaned and left sitting there for some time, which was just consuming dollars. The notion of FinOps really starts to invoke that sense of accountability within teams. And then in turn, because it’s all visible to everyone, helps create that overall cultural shift that you’re looking for. And again, starts to immediately reduce spend.
Scott Stanley
IT and cloud spend isn’t just a finance problem. It’s an engineering signal. FinOps works when it’s practical and repeatable. And when it evolves into operational maturity, that’s when transformation happens.
Derek Marinos
My thanks to Mark van Engelen and Scott Stanley for joining the conversation and sharing their insights. And thank you for listening to A CGI Conversation, where we explore the trends, challenges, and opportunities shaping the future of business and technology. I’m your host, Derek Marinos. Bye for now.
