Cloud Economics Baseline
Build a defensible view of where cloud dollars go and what the business is getting for them. Four entry points, structured around where your practice starts.
Across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and hybrid estates.
Allocation model
A defensible structure that traces every cloud dollar
Business-mapped spend
Cost-to-serve by customer, product, or feature
Optimisation with context
Commitments and rates tuned against business value
Reporting isn't answering
Most organisations can produce a cloud bill. Very few can defend what that bill is delivering.
The reporting gap
Most mid-market and scale-ups can report total cloud spend accurately. Very few can defensibly answer what that spend is delivering, which customers it serves, or which business decisions depend on it.
What closes the gap
A defensible practice across five dimensions: cost attribution, business value mapping, cost optimisation, operating discipline, and AI cost management. The diagnostic shows where you sit on each. The work that follows is scoped to your situation, not to a template.
What good looks like
The five dimensions of a defensible cloud financial practice. The diagnostic shows where you sit on each.
Cost Attribution
Cloud spend is traceable to a named team, product, or business unit. When the CFO asks why spend grew last quarter, the answer comes in a day, not after weeks of manual analysis.
Business Value Mapping
Cloud cost shows up where business decisions happen. You can calculate cost-to-serve per customer, product, or feature, and quantify cloud impact on a pricing change before the decision is made.
Cost Optimisation
Optimisation decisions trace to specific business levers. Commitment coverage runs above 70% of eligible steady-state workload, and savings claims can be assigned to a named owner.
Operating Discipline
The practice runs on a regular cadence with named owners. Forecast variance stays under 15%. The practice survives if any one person leaves.
AI Cost Management
AI and GenAI spend is tracked as its own line, attributable to the teams, products, and features driving it, rather than buried inside general compute. Workloads run behind budgets and guardrails, so a runaway training job or a token-hungry feature is caught within days, not discovered on the next invoice.
How starting with Aureon works
The diagnostic is step one. From there, every engagement is shaped to where you sit.
Take the diagnostic
Ten minutes to measure your cloud financial practice across the five dimensions. You walk away with where you stand and a recommended starting point.
Have the scoping conversation
Thirty minutes with us. The diagnostic result becomes a tailored engagement plan: which entry point, what shape, what your team will need to bring.
Run the engagement
Scoped to your situation, sized as an investment. The work addresses one or more of the five dimensions, depending on what the diagnostic surfaced.
The right starting point depends on where you stand today
Cost Attribution
Your tagging exists but does not produce answers. Your shared services are unsplit. Your unallocated spend is material. The Cost Attribution engagement establishes the allocation model, designs the tag strategy against it, and resolves the gaps that make existing data untrustworthy.
Cost-to-Serve
Your allocation model is defensible. Tagging produces clean attribution. What you cannot yet do is connect cloud spend to customers, products, or features. The Cost-to-Serve engagement produces that view, using the business dimension most relevant to the decisions in front of you.
Rate & Usage
Your allocation is defensible, your business view is connected, and now the levers need pulling. Commitment purchasing, rate optimisation, and usage efficiency work against the model you already have. Every optimisation decision is made in the context of business value, not in isolation.
Full Cloud Economics Baseline
The combined engagement. Cost Attribution, Cost-to-Serve, and Rate & Usage delivered sequentially over a single engagement. For organisations that need the full foundation in place before moving to ongoing FinOps Advisory or broader governance work.
How engagements work
Engagements are sized as investments, scoped to outcomes. Not invoices for effort.
Not sure where to start?
Can your organisation make business decisions on tech spend with confidence? Take the 10-minute Cloud Economics Diagnostic to find out where you stand.
Find out where you standWhy this approach works
Four principles that shape every Aureon engagement.
Mechanism before outcome
Attribution exists to answer business questions; if the model is not defensible, neither are the answers. Rate and usage decisions made against an allocated, business-mapped view produce different choices than the same work done against raw data. Aureon sequences both.
Business dimension matched to your reality
Cost-to-serve looks different for a SaaS business, a marketplace, and a regulated services firm. Aureon scopes to the dimension that actually drives your decisions, not to a template.
Built to survive the handover
The model, the rhythm, and the documentation transfer to your team. The work is a foundation for an ongoing practice, not a one-off consulting artefact.
Framework-aligned, provider-neutral
Aureon draws on the FinOps Foundation framework, the practitioner-developed industry standard for cloud financial management. Allocation, business mapping, and optimisation work apply equally across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and hybrid estates.
Case studies
Case studies are in development. Ask us about engagements like yours. We'll walk you through what we've done.
Ask about our engagementsReady to find out where you stand?
Take the 10-minute Cloud Economics Diagnostic to see where you sit, or book a scoping conversation if you'd rather start there.