Cloud computing has revolutionized the way enterprises operate, offering scalability, speed, and agility. Yet the same elasticity that enables innovation also creates volatility in spending. Organizations are shifting from fixed, predictable capital expenses to highly variable operating costs that can swing dramatically month to month. Industry analysts estimate that more than 30% of enterprise cloud spend is wasted due to inefficiencies, poor governance, and a lack of accountability. Without a disciplined approach, cloud promises of cost efficiency quickly turn into budget overruns and frustrated finance leaders.
It is where the FinOps maturity framework becomes indispensable. FinOps, short for cloud financial operations, is not a one-time initiative but a cultural and operational discipline. It unites finance, engineering, and business stakeholders under a shared language of accountability and value. The maturity model, described as crawl, walk, run, provides a practical roadmap for enterprises to progress systematically. Instead of expecting an overnight transformation, companies evolve step by step, gaining capabilities, cultural alignment, and business impact along the way.
The crawl phase lays the foundation by creating visibility into costs. It is where teams first acknowledge the need for discipline and begin to tag resources, build dashboards, and establish ownership. The walk phase advances maturity by building accountability, introducing structured optimization, and enabling chargeback or showback models that assign costs to the right business units. The run phase represents maturity at scale, where automation, advanced governance, and unit economics tie cloud spend directly to customer value, revenue, and innovation outcomes.
Understanding the FinOps maturity phases is crucial because the cloud has become one of the fastest-growing line items in enterprise IT budgets. CIOs and CFOs are expected to demonstrate not only technical efficiency but also financial responsibility. Boards want assurance that digital transformation is sustainable, not a blank check. The FinOps crawl, walk, run model provides organizations with a structured approach to transition from chaos to control, from visibility to governance, and from costs to value.
This blog unpacks each stage of the FinOps adoption model, providing practical insights, real-world examples, and lessons learned from enterprises at various stages of the journey. You’ll discover what characterizes the crawl, walk, and run phases, what challenges to expect, and how to avoid common pitfalls. By the end, you’ll have a clear roadmap for aligning cloud financial operations with your business objectives and accelerating your own FinOps journey.
The crawl phase is the entry point in the FinOps maturity framework. At this stage, organizations have adopted the cloud, but often lack structured financial controls. Cloud bills arrive in bulk, often confusing finance teams with thousands of line items. Engineers continue deploying resources without visibility into the cost impact of their actions. The result is frustration: finance cannot forecast accurately, and leadership cannot answer the question, “Are we getting value from our cloud spend?”
Characteristics of the Crawl Phase
At this stage, organizations operate reactively. Finance tries to chase invoices, engineers are focused on delivery speed, and executives are left with limited insight into whether cloud investments align with business goals.
Common Challenges in the Crawl Phase
Pitfalls to Avoid
Success Checklist for the Crawl Phase
To progress successfully, organizations in the crawl phase should:
By the end of the crawl stage, the organization should no longer view clouds as a black box. Instead, spending is becoming more transparent, and teams are beginning to realize the importance of accountability.
Case Example:
A fast-growing SaaS company noticed its AWS bill doubling every quarter. Without tagging or dashboards, finance had no way to explain the spike. By instituting mandatory tagging, creating cross-team dashboards, and assigning ownership of top workloads, they reduced waste by 15% in just three months. More importantly, they gained the visibility needed to start conversations about accountability.
CloudNuro helps organizations accelerate this first step by moving beyond spreadsheets and static reports. Instead of waiting months to untangle invoices, CloudNuro delivers automated visibility and tagging insights, so you know precisely who owns what and how much it costs.
The walk phase is the middle stage of the FinOps maturity framework. At this point, organizations have moved beyond visibility and are beginning to establish accountability. Finance, engineering, and business units are no longer working in silos. Instead, cloud cost ownership is shared, and optimization practices are introduced systematically.
At this stage, cloud spend is no longer treated as a mysterious invoice, but rather as an operational factor that teams can influence directly. The FinOps crawl, walk, run model considers this phase pivotal because it transforms cloud costs from unmanaged to manageable and predictable drivers of value.
Characteristics of the Walk Phase
This phase reflects maturity in both culture and practice. Engineers become cost-conscious developers, finance shifts from bill-payers to advisors, and leadership gains confidence in cloud forecasts.
Challenges in the Walk Phase
Transition Checklist: From Crawl to Walk
To graduate from crawl to walk, organizations typically need to:
Case Example:
A retail enterprise running multiple regional e-commerce platforms advanced from crawl to walk by embedding cost dashboards directly into engineering workflows. Developers could see real-time costs associated with deployments, which encouraged them to shut down idle test environments and adopt smaller compute sizes. Within six months, the company achieved an 18% reduction in cloud infrastructure costs while improving forecasting accuracy by 20%.
Why the Walk Phase Is Critical
The walk phase ensures that cloud spend is no longer a shared pool with no accountability. Instead, every team understands its financial footprint and is motivated to optimize. It builds trust between finance and engineering and creates the foundation needed for scaling to the run phase.
CloudNuro makes the walk phase easier by automating showback and chargeback models. Instead of waiting for monthly reports, teams see live dashboards of their usage, enabling faster optimization and accountability without slowing innovation.
The run phase is the most advanced stage of the FinOps maturity framework. At this level, organizations no longer view clouds as an unpredictable cost, but rather as a managed, value-driven asset. They embed automation, advanced governance, and unit economics into their operations so that cloud spend is continuously optimized and directly tied to business outcomes. The FinOps crawl, walk, run journey reaches its full maturity here, where financial accountability becomes second nature across the entire enterprise.
Characteristics of the Run Phase
At this stage, FinOps isn’t just about cost management. It becomes a strategic differentiator that strengthens competitive advantage.
Advanced Practices in the Run Phase
Benefits of the Run Phase
Challenges at the Run Stage
Reaching the run stage doesn’t mean the journey is free of obstacles. Common challenges include:
Case Example:
A global financial services firm reached the run stage after years of implementing structured FinOps. They introduced cost-per-transaction KPIs across their digital banking platforms, enabling executives to tie cloud spend directly to customer acquisition and retention metrics. With advanced automation, their cost forecasting accuracy reached 95%, and cloud spend became a measurable driver of profitability rather than a source of uncertainty.
Run Phase Scorecard
A mature organization in the run phase typically measures itself with the following benchmarks:
The run stage is the point at which the FinOps maturity framework demonstrates its full potential—transforming the cloud from an operational expense into a strategic growth enabler.
CloudNuro helps enterprises accelerate to the run phase by embedding automation, predictive analytics, and policy-driven governance into everyday workflows. With CloudNuro, organizations don’t just manage cloud costs—they translate them into measurable business outcomes that CFOs, CIOs, and engineering leaders can trust.
The FinOps maturity phases—crawl, walk, and run—represent a journey, not a rigid checklist. Each stage builds on the last, creating a roadmap that organizations follow to align financial accountability with cloud innovation.
In the crawl phase, enterprises establish the basics: visibility, tagging, and shared dashboards. The goal is not perfection but transparency. Teams begin to see who owns which costs, and finance gains the ability to track usage beyond lump-sum invoices.
The walk phase introduces accountability and systematic optimization. With tagging standards in place, costs can be allocated fairly across business units. Engineers receive feedback on the financial impact of their choices, while finance shifts into a proactive advisory role. Chargeback and showback models appear, and governance starts to mature.
The run phase represents full adoption of the FinOps maturity framework. Here, governance is automated, unit economics are tracked, and predictive analytics shape financial planning. Cloud spend is no longer treated as overhead—it is directly tied to business value, such as customer growth, revenue expansion, or operational resilience.
Not every organization will progress at the same pace. Some may operate at the crawl stage in specific departments, while others function at the walk or run stage. What matters most is steady progress. The FinOps adoption model acknowledges that cultural change takes time, but each step enhances visibility, accountability, and efficiency.
Ultimately, the FinOps crawl, walk, run model provides enterprises with a roadmap to transform cloud spend from a challenge into a strategic enabler. By advancing through each stage, companies move closer to a future where cloud investments are fully transparent, continuously optimized, and inseparable from business growth.
1. What are the three phases of FinOps maturity?
The three phases of FinOps maturity are Crawl, Walk, and Run. Crawl establishes visibility, Walk builds accountability and optimization, and Run scales governance and links spend to business value.
2. How does the FinOps maturity framework help enterprises?
The FinOps maturity framework provides a structured roadmap for adopting cloud financial operations. It guides organizations from initial visibility into advanced governance, ensuring cloud spend is aligned with business outcomes.
3. What challenges do companies face in early FinOps adoption?
During the crawl stage, challenges include inconsistent tagging, lack of accountability, and manual invoice analysis. Overcoming these requires visibility, shared dashboards, and early cultural alignment.
4. How do organizations move from walk to run in FinOps?
Enterprises progress by automating governance, embedding chargeback models, and tying cloud spend to unit economics like cost per customer or transaction. This shifts focus from cost-cutting to value creation.
5. Is FinOps only about saving money?
No. While optimization reduces waste, FinOps is about striking a balance between speed, cost, and quality. At the run stage, it transforms into a strategic discipline that maximizes ROI from cloud investments.
The FinOps maturity phases—crawl, walk, and run—offer enterprises a structured approach to evolve their cloud financial operations from reactive cost tracking to a proactive driver of business value. This progression matters because the cloud is no longer a side expense; it is one of the largest and fastest-growing items in the IT budget. Without discipline, costs can erode margins and undermine digital transformation initiatives. With FinOps, however, organizations establish visibility, accountability, and governance that create transparency and trust across finance, engineering, and leadership teams.
At the crawl phase, visibility lays the foundation. Teams move away from mystery invoices and gain shared insight into spend patterns. In the walk phase, accountability becomes central, with budgets, chargeback, and optimization models creating ownership at every level. By the time enterprises reach the run phase, FinOps has transformed into a cultural and operational discipline that scales globally. Automation enforces policies, unit economics drive strategic decisions, and cloud costs are directly tied to revenue, customer growth, and innovation outcomes.
The importance of the FinOps adoption model lies not in perfection but in progress. Even incremental steps, such as standardizing tagging or creating dashboards, unlock measurable improvements. Each phase represents a milestone in maturity, and together they form a roadmap for sustainable cloud cost management. The FinOps crawl, walk, run model ensures that cloud spend is not only controlled but also converted into a competitive advantage.
Ultimately, FinOps is about more than saving money. It is about aligning technology investments with business value, giving CFOs confidence, empowering engineers with cost awareness, and enabling executives to deliver on growth strategies without financial surprises. For any enterprise navigating the complexity of cloud economics, adopting the FinOps maturity framework is no longer optional—it is essential.
Many organizations stall at the crawl stage, with lots of dashboards and reports, but little accountability. Others reach the walk phase but struggle to embed chargeback, automation, or unit economics into daily operations. CloudNuro is designed to close these gaps and accelerate the FinOps crawl, walk, run journey.
With CloudNuro, you can:
CloudNuro doesn’t just help with visibility; it operationalizes the FinOps maturity framework, enabling teams to progress confidently from crawl to walk to run. For CFOs, CIOs, and engineering leaders, it provides the automation and insights needed to transform cloud from a cost concern into a strategic enabler.
Request a no cost, no obligation free assessment —just 15 minutes to savings!
Get StartedCloud computing has revolutionized the way enterprises operate, offering scalability, speed, and agility. Yet the same elasticity that enables innovation also creates volatility in spending. Organizations are shifting from fixed, predictable capital expenses to highly variable operating costs that can swing dramatically month to month. Industry analysts estimate that more than 30% of enterprise cloud spend is wasted due to inefficiencies, poor governance, and a lack of accountability. Without a disciplined approach, cloud promises of cost efficiency quickly turn into budget overruns and frustrated finance leaders.
It is where the FinOps maturity framework becomes indispensable. FinOps, short for cloud financial operations, is not a one-time initiative but a cultural and operational discipline. It unites finance, engineering, and business stakeholders under a shared language of accountability and value. The maturity model, described as crawl, walk, run, provides a practical roadmap for enterprises to progress systematically. Instead of expecting an overnight transformation, companies evolve step by step, gaining capabilities, cultural alignment, and business impact along the way.
The crawl phase lays the foundation by creating visibility into costs. It is where teams first acknowledge the need for discipline and begin to tag resources, build dashboards, and establish ownership. The walk phase advances maturity by building accountability, introducing structured optimization, and enabling chargeback or showback models that assign costs to the right business units. The run phase represents maturity at scale, where automation, advanced governance, and unit economics tie cloud spend directly to customer value, revenue, and innovation outcomes.
Understanding the FinOps maturity phases is crucial because the cloud has become one of the fastest-growing line items in enterprise IT budgets. CIOs and CFOs are expected to demonstrate not only technical efficiency but also financial responsibility. Boards want assurance that digital transformation is sustainable, not a blank check. The FinOps crawl, walk, run model provides organizations with a structured approach to transition from chaos to control, from visibility to governance, and from costs to value.
This blog unpacks each stage of the FinOps adoption model, providing practical insights, real-world examples, and lessons learned from enterprises at various stages of the journey. You’ll discover what characterizes the crawl, walk, and run phases, what challenges to expect, and how to avoid common pitfalls. By the end, you’ll have a clear roadmap for aligning cloud financial operations with your business objectives and accelerating your own FinOps journey.
The crawl phase is the entry point in the FinOps maturity framework. At this stage, organizations have adopted the cloud, but often lack structured financial controls. Cloud bills arrive in bulk, often confusing finance teams with thousands of line items. Engineers continue deploying resources without visibility into the cost impact of their actions. The result is frustration: finance cannot forecast accurately, and leadership cannot answer the question, “Are we getting value from our cloud spend?”
Characteristics of the Crawl Phase
At this stage, organizations operate reactively. Finance tries to chase invoices, engineers are focused on delivery speed, and executives are left with limited insight into whether cloud investments align with business goals.
Common Challenges in the Crawl Phase
Pitfalls to Avoid
Success Checklist for the Crawl Phase
To progress successfully, organizations in the crawl phase should:
By the end of the crawl stage, the organization should no longer view clouds as a black box. Instead, spending is becoming more transparent, and teams are beginning to realize the importance of accountability.
Case Example:
A fast-growing SaaS company noticed its AWS bill doubling every quarter. Without tagging or dashboards, finance had no way to explain the spike. By instituting mandatory tagging, creating cross-team dashboards, and assigning ownership of top workloads, they reduced waste by 15% in just three months. More importantly, they gained the visibility needed to start conversations about accountability.
CloudNuro helps organizations accelerate this first step by moving beyond spreadsheets and static reports. Instead of waiting months to untangle invoices, CloudNuro delivers automated visibility and tagging insights, so you know precisely who owns what and how much it costs.
The walk phase is the middle stage of the FinOps maturity framework. At this point, organizations have moved beyond visibility and are beginning to establish accountability. Finance, engineering, and business units are no longer working in silos. Instead, cloud cost ownership is shared, and optimization practices are introduced systematically.
At this stage, cloud spend is no longer treated as a mysterious invoice, but rather as an operational factor that teams can influence directly. The FinOps crawl, walk, run model considers this phase pivotal because it transforms cloud costs from unmanaged to manageable and predictable drivers of value.
Characteristics of the Walk Phase
This phase reflects maturity in both culture and practice. Engineers become cost-conscious developers, finance shifts from bill-payers to advisors, and leadership gains confidence in cloud forecasts.
Challenges in the Walk Phase
Transition Checklist: From Crawl to Walk
To graduate from crawl to walk, organizations typically need to:
Case Example:
A retail enterprise running multiple regional e-commerce platforms advanced from crawl to walk by embedding cost dashboards directly into engineering workflows. Developers could see real-time costs associated with deployments, which encouraged them to shut down idle test environments and adopt smaller compute sizes. Within six months, the company achieved an 18% reduction in cloud infrastructure costs while improving forecasting accuracy by 20%.
Why the Walk Phase Is Critical
The walk phase ensures that cloud spend is no longer a shared pool with no accountability. Instead, every team understands its financial footprint and is motivated to optimize. It builds trust between finance and engineering and creates the foundation needed for scaling to the run phase.
CloudNuro makes the walk phase easier by automating showback and chargeback models. Instead of waiting for monthly reports, teams see live dashboards of their usage, enabling faster optimization and accountability without slowing innovation.
The run phase is the most advanced stage of the FinOps maturity framework. At this level, organizations no longer view clouds as an unpredictable cost, but rather as a managed, value-driven asset. They embed automation, advanced governance, and unit economics into their operations so that cloud spend is continuously optimized and directly tied to business outcomes. The FinOps crawl, walk, run journey reaches its full maturity here, where financial accountability becomes second nature across the entire enterprise.
Characteristics of the Run Phase
At this stage, FinOps isn’t just about cost management. It becomes a strategic differentiator that strengthens competitive advantage.
Advanced Practices in the Run Phase
Benefits of the Run Phase
Challenges at the Run Stage
Reaching the run stage doesn’t mean the journey is free of obstacles. Common challenges include:
Case Example:
A global financial services firm reached the run stage after years of implementing structured FinOps. They introduced cost-per-transaction KPIs across their digital banking platforms, enabling executives to tie cloud spend directly to customer acquisition and retention metrics. With advanced automation, their cost forecasting accuracy reached 95%, and cloud spend became a measurable driver of profitability rather than a source of uncertainty.
Run Phase Scorecard
A mature organization in the run phase typically measures itself with the following benchmarks:
The run stage is the point at which the FinOps maturity framework demonstrates its full potential—transforming the cloud from an operational expense into a strategic growth enabler.
CloudNuro helps enterprises accelerate to the run phase by embedding automation, predictive analytics, and policy-driven governance into everyday workflows. With CloudNuro, organizations don’t just manage cloud costs—they translate them into measurable business outcomes that CFOs, CIOs, and engineering leaders can trust.
The FinOps maturity phases—crawl, walk, and run—represent a journey, not a rigid checklist. Each stage builds on the last, creating a roadmap that organizations follow to align financial accountability with cloud innovation.
In the crawl phase, enterprises establish the basics: visibility, tagging, and shared dashboards. The goal is not perfection but transparency. Teams begin to see who owns which costs, and finance gains the ability to track usage beyond lump-sum invoices.
The walk phase introduces accountability and systematic optimization. With tagging standards in place, costs can be allocated fairly across business units. Engineers receive feedback on the financial impact of their choices, while finance shifts into a proactive advisory role. Chargeback and showback models appear, and governance starts to mature.
The run phase represents full adoption of the FinOps maturity framework. Here, governance is automated, unit economics are tracked, and predictive analytics shape financial planning. Cloud spend is no longer treated as overhead—it is directly tied to business value, such as customer growth, revenue expansion, or operational resilience.
Not every organization will progress at the same pace. Some may operate at the crawl stage in specific departments, while others function at the walk or run stage. What matters most is steady progress. The FinOps adoption model acknowledges that cultural change takes time, but each step enhances visibility, accountability, and efficiency.
Ultimately, the FinOps crawl, walk, run model provides enterprises with a roadmap to transform cloud spend from a challenge into a strategic enabler. By advancing through each stage, companies move closer to a future where cloud investments are fully transparent, continuously optimized, and inseparable from business growth.
1. What are the three phases of FinOps maturity?
The three phases of FinOps maturity are Crawl, Walk, and Run. Crawl establishes visibility, Walk builds accountability and optimization, and Run scales governance and links spend to business value.
2. How does the FinOps maturity framework help enterprises?
The FinOps maturity framework provides a structured roadmap for adopting cloud financial operations. It guides organizations from initial visibility into advanced governance, ensuring cloud spend is aligned with business outcomes.
3. What challenges do companies face in early FinOps adoption?
During the crawl stage, challenges include inconsistent tagging, lack of accountability, and manual invoice analysis. Overcoming these requires visibility, shared dashboards, and early cultural alignment.
4. How do organizations move from walk to run in FinOps?
Enterprises progress by automating governance, embedding chargeback models, and tying cloud spend to unit economics like cost per customer or transaction. This shifts focus from cost-cutting to value creation.
5. Is FinOps only about saving money?
No. While optimization reduces waste, FinOps is about striking a balance between speed, cost, and quality. At the run stage, it transforms into a strategic discipline that maximizes ROI from cloud investments.
The FinOps maturity phases—crawl, walk, and run—offer enterprises a structured approach to evolve their cloud financial operations from reactive cost tracking to a proactive driver of business value. This progression matters because the cloud is no longer a side expense; it is one of the largest and fastest-growing items in the IT budget. Without discipline, costs can erode margins and undermine digital transformation initiatives. With FinOps, however, organizations establish visibility, accountability, and governance that create transparency and trust across finance, engineering, and leadership teams.
At the crawl phase, visibility lays the foundation. Teams move away from mystery invoices and gain shared insight into spend patterns. In the walk phase, accountability becomes central, with budgets, chargeback, and optimization models creating ownership at every level. By the time enterprises reach the run phase, FinOps has transformed into a cultural and operational discipline that scales globally. Automation enforces policies, unit economics drive strategic decisions, and cloud costs are directly tied to revenue, customer growth, and innovation outcomes.
The importance of the FinOps adoption model lies not in perfection but in progress. Even incremental steps, such as standardizing tagging or creating dashboards, unlock measurable improvements. Each phase represents a milestone in maturity, and together they form a roadmap for sustainable cloud cost management. The FinOps crawl, walk, run model ensures that cloud spend is not only controlled but also converted into a competitive advantage.
Ultimately, FinOps is about more than saving money. It is about aligning technology investments with business value, giving CFOs confidence, empowering engineers with cost awareness, and enabling executives to deliver on growth strategies without financial surprises. For any enterprise navigating the complexity of cloud economics, adopting the FinOps maturity framework is no longer optional—it is essential.
Many organizations stall at the crawl stage, with lots of dashboards and reports, but little accountability. Others reach the walk phase but struggle to embed chargeback, automation, or unit economics into daily operations. CloudNuro is designed to close these gaps and accelerate the FinOps crawl, walk, run journey.
With CloudNuro, you can:
CloudNuro doesn’t just help with visibility; it operationalizes the FinOps maturity framework, enabling teams to progress confidently from crawl to walk to run. For CFOs, CIOs, and engineering leaders, it provides the automation and insights needed to transform cloud from a cost concern into a strategic enabler.
Request a no cost, no obligation free assessment —just 15 minutes to savings!
Get Started
CloudNuro Corp
1755 Park St. Suite 207
Naperville, IL 60563
Phone : +1-630-277-9470
Email: info@cloudnuro.com
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