By Viswanath Ramaswamy and Rampal Singh

As digital transformation initiatives accelerate, the cloud has become a foundational element for modern organizations. However, as their cloud adoption increases, so do the financial complexities. To help companies address this challenge, HCLTech and IBM are collaborating to integrate HCLTech’s Hybrid FinOps with IBM Cloudability, creating a comprehensive cloud cost management service. This offering provides businesses with an end-to-end, AI-driven platform to optimize cloud usage and maximize cloud value.

The need for FinOps in multicloud ecosystems

Cloud has enabled enterprises to grow faster and innovate better. But, like every other technological resource, it incurs costs. By the end of 2025, the public cloud market value is expected to reach $723 billion, 51% higher than traditional IT infrastructure spending. However, a substantial amount of cloud spend is often wasted. The main reasons for this are:

• Rising and unpredictable costs: Cloud spending growth outpaces forecasts. AI and data analytics projects experience 10x budget overruns, making cost control increasingly challenging for organizations.
• Lack of cost visibility: Enterprises may struggle to identify which teams drive cloud expenses. This ambiguity can delay corrective or optimization efforts, turning financial governance into reactive firefighting rather than strategic planning.
• Budget overruns: Without real-time financial monitoring, spending anomalies can remain undetected until they exceed budgets. Enterprises can overspend by as much as 50%, which heavily impacts the bottom line when coupled with governance risks.
• Multi-cloud complexity: Enterprises often juggle multiple cloud providers with different pricing models and discount programs. Mergers can bring incompatible cloud environments, complicating cost consolidation and optimization.
• Compliance and security risks: Most governments and industries have strict compliance guidelines around cost tracking. Inadequate cloud monitoring can expose companies to unexpected audit risks, financial penalties and security vulnerabilities.
• Accountability gaps: Cloud expenses span IT, finance and business teams, which can create unclear ownership of financial responsibility, undermining effective cost management and budget adherence.
• Resource wastage and inefficiency: Organizations often fail to right-size workloads or eliminate idle, costly cloud resources. Without automated anomaly detection, spending spikes can go unnoticed, straining budgets further.
• Need for data-driven decision-making: AI-powered insights and usage pattern analyses are crucial for informed financial planning. Comprehensive discount strategies require historical data to maximize cloud savings.

How a FinOps practice solves these challenges

FinOps, or cloud financial operations, is an operational framework that unites finance, operations and technology groups to optimize cloud spend while maintaining financial transparency. By properly implementing FinOps and aligning cloud cost management with business goals, organizations can:

• Achieve end-to-end, real-time visibility into multicloud and hybrid cloud spend
• Detect and remove waste by optimizing cloud resources and automating cost-reduction steps
• Control costs through budget tracking, compliance policies and operational efficiency
• Drive efficiency by measuring internal spending habits and performance against industry benchmarks
• Enhance accountability by allocating and surfacing cloud spend to groups, departments, or projects (chargeback/showback)

Delivering FinOps solutions

In today’s increasingly complex cloud landscape, FinOps strategy is no longer a choice – it’s a necessity.

HCLTech’s Hybrid FinOps, driven by IBM Cloudability, brings together seasoned, services-led FinOps practitioners and robust cloud cost management and optimization software capabilities to deliver a comprehensive FinOps solution that empowers organizations with end-to-end cloud financial management.  Combining sophisticated analytics, governance models and automation Hybrid FinOps helps businesses to move from reactive cloud cost tracking to proactive cost optimization, supporting better financial governance, long-term cloud efficiency and sustainable growth.

Some key advantages of the collaboration include:

• Enhanced Cost Visibility: By integrating the IBM Cloudability platform into Hybrid FinOps, HCLTech can provide businesses with detailed insights into cloud costs, enhance tracking and management and help them better understand their spending patterns and opportunities for optimization.
• Automated Cost Allocation: Cloudability’s automated cost allocation features allow HCLTech to streamline the process of assigning cloud costs to specific departments or projects, helping ensure accurate chargebacks and showbacks and improving financial accountability.
• Predictive Analytics: HCLTech utilizes Cloudability’s predictive analytics to forecast future cloud expenses and usage trends. This helps businesses plan their budgets more effectively and avoid unexpected costs.
• Scalability through expertise: Our FinOps Center of Excellence has certified FinOps practitioners, ensuring deep knowledge in cloud cost management to support the business’ implementation.
• Managed services excellence: By embedding Cloudability into its Hybrid FinOps service model, HCLTech helps enterprises optimize, govern and automate their cloud cost structures.
• Beyond public cloud: Unlike many FinOps solutions focusing solely on public cloud cost management, HCLTech's Hybrid FinOps extends to private clouds and on-premises environments, supporting hybrid multicloud strategies.

The future of FinOps with HCLTech and IBM

Cloud cost management is imperative for strategic business. FinOps has emerged as the key to balancing spend and return as enterprises accelerate their cloud journeys. For organizations looking to gain control over cloud costs, enhance financial accountability and drive long-term efficiency, Hybrid FinOps will be a game changer.

To learn more about how your enterprise can optimize cloud expenditure read here.

Co-authored by

Viswanath Ramaswamy, Vice President, Technology, IBM India & South Asia

Rampal Singh, SVP & Global Business Head, Hybrid Cloud Business Unit, HCLTech