Day24: FinOps Governance Models: Who Decides, Who Pays, Who’s Accountable

FinOps governance models define how cloud financial decisions are made, enforced, and shared across an organization.
They help teams control cloud spending without slowing down innovation.

FinOps governance answers who decides, who pays, and who is accountable for cloud costs.

These models define workflows for budgeting, tagging, approvals, and compliance in cloud environments like AWS or Azure.

They prevent cost overruns by enforcing rules such as mandatory resource tagging or spend thresholds, while enabling data-driven decisions through KPIs like utilization rates.

1. Centralized - Finance owns approvals (regulated orgs)
2. Decentralized - Teams self-govern (agile startups)
3. Federated - Central rules + team execution (enterprise sweet spot)

Governance is applied continuously through the FinOps lifecycle:

1. Inform – Make cloud costs visible
2. Optimize – Improve efficiency and reduce waste
3. Operate – Enforce policies and track accountability

FinOps governance models help organizations manage cloud costs through collaboration not control alone.