As an IT FinOps Consulting Leader working with enterprises of all sizes across diverse industries, I’ve witnessed firsthand the transformative power of effective financial operations (FinOps) and cloud cost management. These disciplines are no longer optional but critical for organizations aiming to optimize their cloud investments while maintaining agility and innovation. However, a lesser-discussed but equally important aspect of cost optimization is addressing duplicative technologies—tools like Zoom or GoToWebinar that overlap with capabilities already available through solutions like Microsoft Teams. In this blog, I will explore what FinOps and cloud cost management entail, why they matter, and why reviewing redundant technologies is a strategic imperative for cost-conscious enterprises.
FinOps, short for Financial Operations, is a cultural and operational framework that aligns finance, IT, and business teams to manage cloud costs effectively. It’s not just about cutting expenses but about maximizing the value of every dollar spent in the cloud. FinOps brings together three core phases:
Inform: Providing visibility into cloud spending through detailed reporting and analytics.
Optimize: Identifying opportunities to reduce waste, such as rightsizing resources or leveraging discounts.
Operate: Embedding cost-awareness into ongoing processes, ensuring sustainable cloud financial management.
FinOps thrives on collaboration, encouraging cross-functional teams to take shared responsibility for cloud costs. It’s a mindset shift from viewing cloud expenses as an IT problem to treating them as a business-wide priority.
Cloud cost management is the tactical execution of controlling and optimizing cloud expenditures. It involves tools, processes, and strategies to monitor usage, forecast costs, and eliminate inefficiencies. Key practices include:
Tagging and Allocation: Assigning metadata to cloud resources to track spending by department, project, or application.
Rightsizing: Adjusting overprovisioned resources, like oversized virtual machines, to match actual workloads.
Reserved Instances and Savings Plans: Committing to longer-term usage for discounts on services like AWS EC2 or Azure VMs.
Waste Elimination: Identifying and shutting down unused or underutilized resources, such as orphaned storage volumes.
While FinOps provides the overarching framework, cloud cost management involves the hands-on implementation of cost-saving measures. Together, they enable organizations to strike a balance between performance, scalability, and affordability in the cloud.
The Cloud Providers’ pay-as-you-go model offers unparalleled flexibility, but without proper oversight, costs can spiral out of control. It’s well understood that technology spend is one of the largest cost centers for many organizations. The Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report findings show that average overspend is rising in areas such as SaaS applications (23%), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)/platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and cloud services (22%). Drilling down further, 31% of IT leaders identify security tools as the number one area of overspending. FinOps and cloud cost management address this by:
Driving Accountability: By providing granular cost insights, teams understand their spending impact and make informed decisions.
Enhancing Agility: Optimized cloud budgets free up resources for innovation, allowing businesses to pivot quickly in competitive markets.
Mitigating Financial Risk: Proactive cost management prevents budget overruns, ensuring predictable financial performance.
Supporting Sustainability: Reducing wasteful cloud usage lowers energy consumption, aligning with corporate sustainability goals.
For small and medium enterprises, FinOps can be a game-changer, enabling them to compete with larger players by maximizing limited budgets. For large enterprises, it’s a way to tame sprawling cloud environments that often span multiple providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
While optimizing cloud infrastructure is a cornerstone of FinOps, another critical area often overlooked is the proliferation of duplicative software licenses and SaaS overlap. Many organizations invest in third-party tools that replicate functionality already available in their existing tech stack. A prime example is the overlap between Microsoft Teams and tools like Zoom, GoToWebinar, or other collaboration and online seminar platforms.
Microsoft Teams has evolved far beyond a chat tool into a comprehensive collaboration hub. Its features include:
Video Conferencing: High-quality video calls with up to 1,000 participants, rivaling Zoom’s capabilities.
Webinars and Live Events: Support for Large Meetings, webinars with registration, Q&A, and analytics, like GoToWebinar.
Screen Sharing and Collaboration: Real-time document editing and whiteboarding, reducing the need for additional tools.
Integration: Seamless connectivity with Microsoft 365 apps and third-party tools, centralizing workflows.
Despite these robust features, many organizations continue to pay for redundant platforms, often due to legacy contracts, user preferences, or a lack of awareness about Teams’ full potential. This redundancy creates several challenges:
Increased Costs: Licensing fees for multiple tools add up quickly. For example, Zoom’s Business plan costs $21.99 per user per month (billed monthly), while GoToWebinar’s Professional plan starts at $129 per month. These expenses are unnecessary if Microsoft Teams already meets the organization’s needs.
Operational Inefficiency: Managing multiple platforms increases IT overhead, from provisioning accounts to ensuring security compliance.
Fragmented User Experience: Employees juggling between tools face productivity losses and a disjointed collaboration experience.
Security Risks: Each additional tool introduces potential vulnerabilities, complicating governance and compliance efforts.
Reviewing and consolidating overlapping technologies is a natural extension of FinOps principles. Here’s why organizations should prioritize this:
Cost Savings: Eliminating redundant tools directly reduces software licensing costs. For a 250-employee company, cutting Zoom licenses could save over $65,000 annually, assuming a business plan subscription is in place. Imagine what those savings look like if you have more users!
Streamlined Operations: Consolidating on a single platform, such as Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams, simplifies IT management, freeing up resources for strategic initiatives.
Improved Adoption: Standardizing Teams encourages employees to fully leverage its features, driving deeper integration with Microsoft 365 workflows.
Enhanced Governance: Fewer tools mean fewer security and compliance blind spots, which are critical in industries like healthcare and finance, where strict regulations apply.
To conduct a review for transitioning fully to Teams, for example, an organization should:
Audit Current Tools: Inventory all collaboration platforms and map their features against Teams’ capabilities.
Assess Usage: Analyze usage, adoption rates, and use cases to identify underutilized or redundant tools and resources.
Engage Stakeholders: Involve business units to understand specific needs and address resistance to change.
Pilot Consolidation: Transition a department to Teams-only workflows to test feasibility before enterprise-wide rollout.
Train Users: Provide training to maximize Teams adoption and minimize disruption.
Consolidating tools isn’t without hurdles. Some teams may prefer Zoom’s interface or GoToWebinar’s specialized webinar features. Others may have contractual obligations with third-party vendors. To address these:
Evaluate Trade-Offs: Compare minor feature gaps against cost savings and operational benefits.
Negotiate Exits: Work with vendors to phase out contracts or explore reduced plans during transitions.
Change Management: Invest in effective communication and training to help employees transition smoothly into the new workflow.
FinOps and cloud cost management are indispensable for organizations navigating the complexities of cloud adoption. By fostering collaboration, providing visibility, and driving optimization, they ensure cloud investments deliver maximum value. Equally important is addressing duplicative technologies, such as Zoom or GoToWebinar, which inflate costs and fragment operations. For organizations already investing in the Microsoft stack, consolidating on platforms like Microsoft Teams enables enterprises to streamline their tech stack, reduce expenses, and enhance productivity, all while staying true to FinOps principles. I encourage organizations to adopt a holistic approach to cost management, addressing both infrastructure and software redundancies to build a leaner, more agile future.
Is your organization already paying for powerful tools like Microsoft Teams, but still shelling out for Zoom, GoToWebinar, or other duplicative software platforms?
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Don’t let overspending go unnoticed. We’ve helped organizations uncover seven-figure savings by streamlining their tech stack and aligning licenses with actual needs.