Many organizations start their cloud journey with a lift-and-shift migration. It’s a fast way to get started and reap immediate benefits. But it often comes with a hidden cost: overprovisioning.
For example, an organization may migrate their hundreds of on-premise servers to Amazon EC2 instances. While the move provides agility and flexibility, the initial cloud spend is high. Engineering grapples with significant costs, a common scenario when legacy systems are moved to the cloud without a focus on cloud-native optimization.
At nvisia, we often see this pattern firsthand when helping clients modernize—cloud migration delivers agility, but without an architecture for financial accountability, costs can quickly spiral.
This challenge isn't unique to lift-and-shift migrations.
It reflects a broader need for what we call a Domain-driven FinOps Review—a structured, architectural approach to aligning financial management with cloud operations to drive long-term modernization and business value.
Other issues that could prompt such a review include a merger or acquisition that brings in a new cloud environment, unexpected spikes in billing due to misconfigurations or rogue applications, or a lack of cost ownership and accountability across engineering teams.
A common approach to tackling this problem is to partner with your FinOps team to develop a strategy. FinOps isn’t just a reporting function—it’s an architected discipline that brings financial accountability into engineering decisions. Dashboards, for example, should be designed as repeatable playbooks, not just ad hoc reports. A dashboard will often include key features like:
Dashboard searches should support filtering through criteria like Cost Center, Cost Center Manager, Tag Name, Amazon Resource Name (ARN), and Billing Periods. This granular visibility can be the foundation to a playbook for executives seeking both short-term and long-term cost savings.
Executing a Domain-driven FinOps Review can follow a simple but effective strategy: assign domain leaders a task to analyze each business service in their domain. This structured approach avoids siloed fixes and provides a holistic roadmap for modernization. Domain leaders can create a comprehensive list of all business services, identified by their Tag Name. This tag, applied to resources across lifecycles like dev, quality assurance, user acceptance testing, and production, provides the necessary context for analysis.
For each Tag Name, have domain leaders search for opportunities in these key areas:
To prioritize which Tag Names to address, domain leaders can implement a scorecard—ranking services by potential cost savings, ease of implementation, and business impact. For example, a Tag Name with high overprovisioning and a clear downtime window earns a high score, making it a prime candidate for a quick win.
Based on the scorecard, the domain leader can create a roadmap for addressing each Tag Name. It's crucial that any changes are applied across the lifecycle—from dev to production—to avoid unexpected issues. Analytics are key here; for example, reducing the number of servers in a cluster requires a stress test to ensure the system can still handle its load.
A Domain-driven FinOps Review can provide a clear, actionable roadmap for each domain in your organization. With proper prioritization, you should begin to see reductions in spend almost immediately. But this exercise is not just about cutting costs. It's about optimizing cloud resources to create strategic business value.
By gaining visibility and implementing a systemic approach, you can transform your cloud spend from a liability into an architected advantage—a foundation for both efficiency and long-term competitive differentiation.