Top 5 FinOps Strategies to Cut Cloud Waste and Strengthen Healthcare Compliance 

At a Glance

• FinOps streamlines cloud cost manage ment by providing real-time expense visibility, optimizing resource allocation, and enabling data-driven decisions to enhance efficiency and reduce risks.
• FinOps helps strengthen your organization’s security posture by aligning financial and operational controls to reduce vulnerabilities.
• FinOps simplifies regulatory compliance by providing robust auditing and reporting tools designed for your cloud infrastructure.

Why Healthcare Needs FinOps: Solving Cloud Waste, Risk, and Misalignment

The cloud offers healthcare organizations the scalability and agility they need—but managing it effectively is complex. In addition to ensuring uptime and security, providers must stay compliant with strict regulations like HIPAA, HITRUST, and HITECH, all while keeping cloud costs under control. It’s clear that the cloud is here to stay. This year (2024), 89% of organizations are using multiple cloud services for their IT, and by 2023, 73% of healthcare providers were using more than one public cloud.

The adoption of multi-cloud strategies has significantly contributed to the growing and costly issue of cloud waste. Fifty-eight percent of organizations feel that their cloud costs are too high, and 82% have doubts about how well they are managing their cloud spending.  Even early-stage FinOps teams see around 30% of cloud spend wasted, according to the 2025 State of FinOps report.

Healthcare is no exception. Unused resources, oversized environments, and inefficient designs can silently drain budgets and reduce the long-term value of cloud investments. In an industry where every dollar matters, reducing waste isn’t just a best practice—it’s a financial imperative.

That’s where Financial Operations (FinOps) comes in.

FinOps is an operational framework and cultural practice that helps organizations maximize the business value of their cloud investments. It aligns finance, engineering, and business teams to enable data-driven decisions and shared accountability.

FinOps as a Catalyst for Efficiency and Cost Reduction

FinOps is a powerful catalyst for healthcare organizations aiming to reduce cloud costs and improve efficiency—while maintaining compliance and security. It addresses widespread waste from underutilized resources and empowers teams to take control of their cloud economics through:

• Reserved instances and auto-stop features that eliminate idle spend
• Anomaly detection and spend monitoring to flag unusual patterns early
• Actionable insights that optimize resource allocation and enhance forecasting
• Scalable practices that support growth without driving up unnecessary costs
• Measurable savings that can be reinvested into innovation and patient care

With the right FinOps strategy, healthcare organizations can align technical performance with financial accountability—unlocking both cost efficiency and long-term cloud value.

How FinOps Enhances Visibility and Governance in Multi-Cloud Environments

Multi-cloud infrastructures bring flexibility, but can introduce complexity in oversight and cost control. Therefore, a seamless, unified view across all cloud providers is essential for simplifying governance and maintaining accountability. It’s even more important to find a partner that offers a centralized platform to effectively manage diverse cloud environments.

With FinOps practices, organizations can bridge the visibility gap between Capital Expenditures (CapEx) and Operational Expenditures (OpEx). Decision-makers gain a complete understanding of their cloud spend, ensuring alignment with clinical and operational priorities. Unified dashboards allow healthcare organizations to:

• Identify unbalanced resource allocation
• Prevent unexpected billing surprises
• Enhance forecasting capabilities to support long-term planning

FinOps helps eliminate operational silos, supporting a cohesive approach to resource management, which is vital in environments as intricate and sensitive as healthcare.

Reducing Cloud Security Risks Through Financial Oversight

Healthcare cloud environments face mounting security risks, from misconfigured resources, to forgotten assets that expand attack surfaces. These risks can lead to breaches, non-compliance penalties, and damaged reputations. FinOps actively fortifies security infrastructure.

Integrating FinOps capabilities with CSPM tools enhances both financial governance and security oversight, ensuring resource usage aligns with security policies.

This approach helps organizations identify:

• Orphaned resources that can increase security vulnerabilities
• Misconfigured assets that may lead to compliance risks with standards like HIPAA or HITRUST
• Shadow IT, where unapproved assets create hidden risks and liabilities

By combining financial operations with cloud security management, organizations can maintain audit readiness, streamline compliance processes, and demonstrate that financial accountability and security are interconnected priorities, not separate silos.

Aligning DevOps, Finance, and Security Teams Through FinOps

Cloud management can easily become fragmented when finance, security, and DevOps teams operate in silos.

FinOps brings these teams together by enabling:

• Real-time visibility into cloud usage and spending
• Shared accountability across financial and technical stakeholders
• Deployment of only necessary resources, reducing both cost and risk
• Automatic flagging of anomalies in configurations or spending patterns
• Stronger collaboration, improving decision-making and alignment

By bridging these gaps, FinOps creates operational harmony—uniting business goals with technical execution to improve cost-efficiency, compliance, and cloud security.

Future-Proof Your Multi-Cloud Strategy with ClearDATA FinOps

ClearDATA’s FinOps services deliver meaningful value by optimizing both cost and compliance outcomes for healthcare organizations operating in the cloud.

Here’s how:

• Cost Optimization at the Core: We proactively identify underutilized resources, detect anomalies, and highlight deviations from expected usage trends. Our team delivers actionable recommendations like reserved instances, auto-stop policies, and termination schedules to eliminate waste and boost ROI.
• Unified Multi-Cloud Visibility: As a multi-cloud partner, we bring deep infrastructure and security insight across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Our centralized approach eliminates the need for fragmented cloud-native toolsets, simplifying monitoring and decision-making.
• Tailored Support Across Cloud Maturity: Whether your cloud program is just starting or highly mature, we meet you where you are. From tagging and cost tracking to advanced automation and accountability frameworks, we help elevate your FinOps practice.
• FinOps + CSPM Integration: Our unique integration of FinOps with CSPM ensures only secure and essential cloud resources are deployed—optimizing for both cost and risk.

More than half of ClearDATA customers start their journey with ClearDATA reporting over 10% waste.

With ClearDATA, FinOps becomes a strategic lever for performance, security, and long-term cloud value. Discover how our solutions can help you optimize costs while maintaining compliance and security in the cloud.

Explore ClearDATA’s FinOps solutions today