As organizations continue to learn more about FinOps, they see the benefits of effective cost management and optimization.
Translated from State of Finops Survey Points to Room for More Automation, by Lucas Paratore; cathal cleary。The latest survey from the FinOps** session shows that automation is increasing, but manual tasks remain, and priorities are changing as organizations become more mature in adopting FinOps. Now in its third year, the FinOps State of the Year Survey is run by the FinOps Association to gain insight into the industry and how organizations are adopting the practice. Since its launch in 2021, the number of respondents has grown from more than 800 participants to 1,245 this year, representing approximately $55 billion in cloud spending. The survey has 38 questions, many of which are carried over from previous years, to showcase industry trends. So let's dive into our takeaways and what they mean for you. 
The first is the most cited question in the State of FinOps survey: "What are your organization's key priorities?" "The results were astonishing.
Empowering Engineers in Action has been a top challenge for the past three years, but in its most recent release, it was ranked sixth. Looking at the list of challenges, this could be due to several reasons.
For example, as more organizations adopt automation, they become less reliant on engineers to take action. Automated rate optimization eliminates the overhead of managing Reserved Instances. The optimistic view is that engineers are taking the initiative to implement the optimization of the FinOps team and embrace the vision.
The industry is building momentum, and as organizations become more aware of FinOps, they see the benefits of effective cost management and optimization. In FinOpsX 2023, Adobe discusses how its FinOps team can help improve efficiency across the organization, funding some of Firefly's development and rollout. Their ability to demonstrate these strengths ultimately leads to buy-in at the organizational level. Two of the biggest challenges this year are related to optimizing priorities. This is not a surprise to many. We've seen a strong focus on usage and rate optimization. The findings show that most organizations have a significant opportunity to optimize workloads outside of computing, especially through automation. We'll look at these results in the next section. One way to look at these two points together is that they represent an industry-level acceptance of the need for optimization to be a concern for the entire organization. As cloud spending is at an all-time high in the enterprise, it has caught the attention of executives and board members. The survey results validate this by 49% of respondents choosing "executive buy-in" as the top challenge for adopting FinOps.
In our experience, when cost optimization is integrated into an organization's culture from top to bottom, years of optimization attempts and mediocre results can turn into success overnight. Typical optimization tasks such as idle instances and fractured volumes can now be well served with automation. Teams can focus their attention higher up in the value chain, but need more executive support to achieve their goals.
One of the most interesting survey questions is about how companies are building automation into their systems and processes. While most companies have implemented some degree of automation, most use it for detection, not remediation. What's holding people back from fully automating? Embracing automation at a strategic level often occurs in multiple phases, starting with alerts. Alerting may be an underestimated step, but it's crucial because change starts with awareness. Once we realize that this link is working, we have to build trust.
Building trust is definitely the hardest part of implementing automation at scale. You shouldn't expect an organization to automate all systems in one go. We generally recommend a temporary status of "alert with approval". For example, a user receives an email or alert that they can manually approve to trigger an action. While this gives engineers the power to act, it creates delays because the work has to wait for a human to click a button. This interim phase is critical to building trust – but only if alerts are always accurate and acted upon accordingly. If this is the case, engineers can feel confident in their platform's capabilities and, ideally, can scale automation to more parts of the system without waiting for slow humans.
From 3 in 20237 tools increased to 4 in 2024The average of 1 tool, which is a worrying trend, and practitioners feel that they have to combine multiple tools together to get the combination of features they need. A vendor with a broad functional base and the ability to further invest will provide the streamlined operating environment that practitioners need.
Finally, one of the encouraging results of the survey is that while only 19% of respondents said that sustainability was a concern for their FinOps team in 2023, this figure grew by 30% to 40% in 2024, with the EMEA region being the most interested in sustainability. One of the drivers is the European Union's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). We expect more technology providers to release GreenOps dashboards and datasets to help customers meet reporting requirements on emissions from their public cloud use. 
Automation was the main message of this year's survey. Effective automation can reduce repetitive tasks and allow humans to focus on more valuable activities. But automation requires trust. FinOps practitioners are struggling to enable higher-level automation use cases due to a lack of trust. Kevin Clark's article series on The New Stack offers great insights for new leaders, including advice on building trust. As with typical hype curves, the push for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) use cases is characterized by a less cost-conscious focus on delivering innovative features to businesses, but this will change as adoption grows. FinOps teams now need to prepare for the inevitable executive conversations about costs, when reality begins to dip in.