As demonstrated by forward-thinking organizations and shared through the FinOps Foundation’s community stories, this case reflects practical strategies enterprises are using to reclaim control over cloud and SaaS spend.
In the boardrooms of global enterprises, the conversation around cloud cost is maturing, but one critical blind spot remains. As FinOps practices evolve and reporting becomes more robust, most visibility still ends where the cloud invoice ends. On-premise infrastructure, which powers mission-critical workloads, database backends, custom legacy stacks, and compliance-bound applications, remains invisible in financial models. It’s not because these systems don’t cost money. It’s because their costs are stored in contracts, procurement databases, depreciation schedules, and energy consumption reports. The data exists, but it doesn’t speak the same language as the cloud.
This was the core challenge facing a hybrid enterprise operating across Europe, North America, and Asia, with a digital footprint that included AWS, Azure, on-prem data centers, and over fifty distributed applications. For years, their FinOps journey focused on public cloud billing. They had clear dashboards for EC2, RDS, and GKE. They knew how much Kubernetes cost per pod. But they couldn’t answer a more strategic question: what does it cost to run a business service that spans cloud compute, on-prem storage, and network appliances spread across four continents?
This case study unpacks their transformation, which began with a strategic commitment to the FOCUS specification. Rather than treating on-premise as an edge case, they rebuilt their FinOps architecture to treat it as a peer to cloud. They created a Multi-Cloud FOCUS FinOps strategy, ingesting on-prem cost and usage data, applying normalization rules, and creating a semantic alignment between cloud telemetry and physical infrastructure. This enabled them to answer, for the first time:
By aligning their FinOps model with the three scopes of FOCUS, Cloud, On-Prem, and SaaS, they created a cross-environment truth. Their dashboards no longer exclude critical workloads. Their forecasts no longer ignored licensing and hardware renewal cycles. Their cost allocations finally reflected the full lifecycle of services, not just the cloud-native layer.
This was more than a technical success. It was a strategic capability shift. Financial planning, engineering accountability, vendor negotiations, and capacity decisions all improved once on-prem cost data was normalized into the FinOps workflow.
CloudNuro.ai helps enterprises build this normalization layer across environments. Whether your infrastructure lives in the cloud, across colocation partners, or inside decades-old hardware, our platform makes it visible, traceable, and allocable with confidence.
Before embarking on this transformation, the enterprise had already developed a mature FinOps practice across its public cloud workloads. Reserved instance strategies were optimized, anomaly detection was operationalized, and engineering teams were familiar with their cost per cluster or per deployment. Yet every report to finance or executive leadership included the same asterisk: "on-prem costs not included." This asterisk wasn’t just cosmetic. It masked tens of millions in annual spend, distorted unit economics, and prevented accurate product-level profitability modeling.
The journey to full hybrid cost normalization began with a simple insight: the company could not claim financial accountability for infrastructure if half of that infrastructure remained outside the FinOps model.
The first challenge was data discovery. Unlike cloud infrastructure, where every byte and second is metered and exported through APIs, on-premise systems offered no such consistency. Costs were scattered across systems of record:
The FinOps team began by cataloging these sources. They created ingestion scripts to pull CPU, RAM, and storage usage from hypervisors. They extracted energy consumption by rack, mapped it to workloads using asset IDs, and tagged each physical machine with cost center ownership. Data was validated weekly, then pushed into their central FinOps data lake for correlation with cloud telemetry.
This process transformed on-premise infrastructure from an opaque cost blob into a rich usage map aligned with business services.
The organization adopted the FOCUS framework not just for cloud, but as a common language across all infrastructure types. FOCUS Scopes 1 (Cloud) and 2 (SaaS) were already implemented. The team now prioritized FOCUS Scope 3 (On-Prem) and its specification elements.
They created structured cost objects for:
Each object was assigned a unique workload ID and mapped to FOCUS dimensions such as environment, owner, service, and business unit. Shared infrastructure, like authentication services and caching layers, was modeled as a shared resource with weight-based allocation.
This approach removed subjectivity from cost modeling. On-prem and cloud services now share a vocabulary for cost per unit, service attribution, and reporting cadence.
CloudNuro supports this dimension-based alignment through workload-level mapping across SaaS, cloud, and on-premise infrastructure, unified under a standard cost dictionary.
Having structured the data, the next challenge was normalization. Cloud services were billed hourly or by API call. On-prem services ran 24/7, shared space and power, and followed different billing models. The team introduced cost normalization logic to achieve parity.
Examples included:
Normalization allowed the FinOps team to compare apples to apples. The cost of running a containerized workload in Azure could now be compared with the same workload on a legacy VMware stack in the regional data center.
With normalized data in place, the next challenge was adoption. The FinOps team created visualizations that merged cloud and on-prem spend across familiar hierarchies:
Dashboards were embedded into sprint planning, quarterly business reviews, and vendor renegotiation meetings. Finance teams could now see cost growth patterns that were previously hidden. Engineering leads were able to identify underutilized clusters on-prem that were more expensive than cloud options. Executives gained a single view of infrastructure that transcended hosting location.
CloudNuro supports hybrid dashboards that correlate normalized cost data across cloud, SaaS, and on-prem platforms with line-of-business traceability.
The final milestone was turning visibility into action. With normalization in place, the company began enforcing internal chargeback for shared platforms using usage-based allocation. Teams received forecast models combining both cloud burst behavior and on-prem usage trends.
Forecasting was improved by including renewal timelines for on-prem infrastructure, license expiration schedules, and facility capacity constraints. Budgeting became more accurate. Vendor negotiations gained leverage. Internal teams began to treat infrastructure capacity as a finite, priced resource, regardless of where it lived.
Cloud and on-prem decisions were now made using the same financial model. The playing field was level, and infrastructure strategy became outcome-driven instead of location-bound.
By extending FinOps beyond cloud and into the physical core of their infrastructure, this hybrid enterprise eliminated the blind spots that had undermined strategic planning, cost recovery, and engineering trust. The FOCUS-aligned strategy didn’t just unify reporting formats. It reshaped how decisions were made across procurement, finance, and product engineering. These are the results that followed.
Before the transformation, the company’s financial planning and analysis (FP&A) function excluded over twenty percent of total infrastructure spend from cloud cost forecasts due to a lack of visibility. On-prem costs lived in isolated ledgers and had no linkage to usage telemetry.
After adopting Scope 3 of the FOCUS standard and normalizing CapEx, depreciation, licensing, and power usage, the team exposed over $21 million in annual infrastructure spend previously missed in reporting cycles. This allowed finance teams to:
This visibility shift improved budget precision and unlocked faster decision cycles.
Before the normalization effort, forecast variance across hybrid systems was consistently above 30 percent. Engineering teams struggled to project their full usage, often modeling only their cloud footprint. Hardware refresh cycles and power draw were excluded from spend plans.
With unified data, forecast variance dropped by 37 percent in six months. Workload owners now receive holistic forecasts combining cloud scaling patterns and on-prem cost pressures. This clarity enabled:
CloudNuro enables this same variance reduction by delivering normalized forecasting across all infrastructure types, enriched with usage, commitment logic, and business context.
The company used normalized FOCUS data to launch a formal chargeback program. Instead of flat allocation or headcount-based splits, internal teams were now charged based on actual usage across cloud and physical environments.
The new model included:
As a result, platform teams had complete cost visibility. Application teams saw a direct financial impact. Engineering behavior changed because usage and cost were finally linked.
With normalized visibility into on-prem workloads, the team was able to identify aging hardware with poor cost-to-performance ratios. Some were running legacy services that had been silently duplicated in the cloud. Others were underutilized by more than 80 percent.
This insight accelerated:
Over 18 months of projected lifecycle drift were eliminated by targeting optimization efforts where normalized cost signals revealed waste.
Perhaps the most strategic outcome was executive-level adoption. Budgeting, business case development, and long-range planning could now include the full cost of infrastructure, cloud, SaaS, and on-prem, in a single data model. This enabled:
The asterisk next to “on-prem not included” disappeared from boardroom reports. Hybrid infrastructure was now visible, accountable, and aligned with product strategy.
This enterprise’s success was not just about tooling. It was about building a financial language that could span legacy and modern systems, procurement and engineering teams, and variable billing models. For any organization pursuing a unified hybrid FinOps architecture, these are the five lessons that can serve as both guidance and guardrails.
Most FinOps platforms and practices begin in public cloud because that’s where metering is easiest. But infrastructure spending doesn’t stop there. If you’re only measuring what the cloud provider sends you, you’re missing large chunks of your cost base. FinOps must reflect the full estate, not just the digital layer.
CloudNuro gives you visibility into SaaS, cloud, and on-prem spend in one unified view, removing the scope blind spots.
Without normalization, dashboards lie. Cloud may report cost per GB-hour, while on-prem hardware reports power per rack. Until your data model speaks a common language, you’ll only have fragments. Normalize units, usage, and attribution across all environments before trying to compare or forecast.
The power of the FOCUS framework is in its dimensions. When you model infrastructure using consistent labels like service, environment, business unit, and owner, you enable cross-environment clarity. This alignment turns cost into a story that makes sense to engineering, finance, and leadership at the same time.
If your product spans cloud APIs, on-prem batch processing, and SaaS orchestration, your cost reporting should too. Build views that show the complete workload path. Let teams see how services interact financially across platforms. This builds trust and drives shared accountability.
Visibility is not the final step. It’s the starting point for action. Design your cost ingestion and normalization models with downstream use cases in mind, whether it’s forecasting for budget season or chargeback for shared services. The sooner you model ownership, the faster you move from reporting to governance.
This hybrid enterprise didn’t just extend FinOps to include on-premise infrastructure. They redefined what completeness means in cost governance. By adopting the FOCUS framework across all scopes and implementing cross-environment normalization, they turned fragmented spending into a unified, allocable system of financial truth.
They no longer relied on cloud-native tools that couldn’t see physical servers. They no longer modeled product economics on partial data. They no longer exclude critical workloads from forecasting. With normalized dimensions, mapped usage, and standard cost hierarchies, they gained visibility that supported budgeting, planning, and decision-making at every level.
CloudNuro.ai enables the same level of transparency and control for hybrid enterprises. Our platform:
If your FinOps practice is hitting a ceiling because on-premise infrastructure remains invisible, CloudNuro helps you break through it.
Want to replicate this transformation?
Book a free FinOps insights demo with CloudNuro.ai and see how we unify cloud, SaaS, and on-premise cost governance into one actionable platform.
As demonstrated by forward-thinking organizations and shared through the FinOps Foundation’s community stories, this case reflects practical strategies enterprises are using to reclaim control over cloud and SaaS spend.
In the boardrooms of global enterprises, the conversation around cloud cost is maturing, but one critical blind spot remains. As FinOps practices evolve and reporting becomes more robust, most visibility still ends where the cloud invoice ends. On-premise infrastructure, which powers mission-critical workloads, database backends, custom legacy stacks, and compliance-bound applications, remains invisible in financial models. It’s not because these systems don’t cost money. It’s because their costs are stored in contracts, procurement databases, depreciation schedules, and energy consumption reports. The data exists, but it doesn’t speak the same language as the cloud.
This was the core challenge facing a hybrid enterprise operating across Europe, North America, and Asia, with a digital footprint that included AWS, Azure, on-prem data centers, and over fifty distributed applications. For years, their FinOps journey focused on public cloud billing. They had clear dashboards for EC2, RDS, and GKE. They knew how much Kubernetes cost per pod. But they couldn’t answer a more strategic question: what does it cost to run a business service that spans cloud compute, on-prem storage, and network appliances spread across four continents?
This case study unpacks their transformation, which began with a strategic commitment to the FOCUS specification. Rather than treating on-premise as an edge case, they rebuilt their FinOps architecture to treat it as a peer to cloud. They created a Multi-Cloud FOCUS FinOps strategy, ingesting on-prem cost and usage data, applying normalization rules, and creating a semantic alignment between cloud telemetry and physical infrastructure. This enabled them to answer, for the first time:
By aligning their FinOps model with the three scopes of FOCUS, Cloud, On-Prem, and SaaS, they created a cross-environment truth. Their dashboards no longer exclude critical workloads. Their forecasts no longer ignored licensing and hardware renewal cycles. Their cost allocations finally reflected the full lifecycle of services, not just the cloud-native layer.
This was more than a technical success. It was a strategic capability shift. Financial planning, engineering accountability, vendor negotiations, and capacity decisions all improved once on-prem cost data was normalized into the FinOps workflow.
CloudNuro.ai helps enterprises build this normalization layer across environments. Whether your infrastructure lives in the cloud, across colocation partners, or inside decades-old hardware, our platform makes it visible, traceable, and allocable with confidence.
Before embarking on this transformation, the enterprise had already developed a mature FinOps practice across its public cloud workloads. Reserved instance strategies were optimized, anomaly detection was operationalized, and engineering teams were familiar with their cost per cluster or per deployment. Yet every report to finance or executive leadership included the same asterisk: "on-prem costs not included." This asterisk wasn’t just cosmetic. It masked tens of millions in annual spend, distorted unit economics, and prevented accurate product-level profitability modeling.
The journey to full hybrid cost normalization began with a simple insight: the company could not claim financial accountability for infrastructure if half of that infrastructure remained outside the FinOps model.
The first challenge was data discovery. Unlike cloud infrastructure, where every byte and second is metered and exported through APIs, on-premise systems offered no such consistency. Costs were scattered across systems of record:
The FinOps team began by cataloging these sources. They created ingestion scripts to pull CPU, RAM, and storage usage from hypervisors. They extracted energy consumption by rack, mapped it to workloads using asset IDs, and tagged each physical machine with cost center ownership. Data was validated weekly, then pushed into their central FinOps data lake for correlation with cloud telemetry.
This process transformed on-premise infrastructure from an opaque cost blob into a rich usage map aligned with business services.
The organization adopted the FOCUS framework not just for cloud, but as a common language across all infrastructure types. FOCUS Scopes 1 (Cloud) and 2 (SaaS) were already implemented. The team now prioritized FOCUS Scope 3 (On-Prem) and its specification elements.
They created structured cost objects for:
Each object was assigned a unique workload ID and mapped to FOCUS dimensions such as environment, owner, service, and business unit. Shared infrastructure, like authentication services and caching layers, was modeled as a shared resource with weight-based allocation.
This approach removed subjectivity from cost modeling. On-prem and cloud services now share a vocabulary for cost per unit, service attribution, and reporting cadence.
CloudNuro supports this dimension-based alignment through workload-level mapping across SaaS, cloud, and on-premise infrastructure, unified under a standard cost dictionary.
Having structured the data, the next challenge was normalization. Cloud services were billed hourly or by API call. On-prem services ran 24/7, shared space and power, and followed different billing models. The team introduced cost normalization logic to achieve parity.
Examples included:
Normalization allowed the FinOps team to compare apples to apples. The cost of running a containerized workload in Azure could now be compared with the same workload on a legacy VMware stack in the regional data center.
With normalized data in place, the next challenge was adoption. The FinOps team created visualizations that merged cloud and on-prem spend across familiar hierarchies:
Dashboards were embedded into sprint planning, quarterly business reviews, and vendor renegotiation meetings. Finance teams could now see cost growth patterns that were previously hidden. Engineering leads were able to identify underutilized clusters on-prem that were more expensive than cloud options. Executives gained a single view of infrastructure that transcended hosting location.
CloudNuro supports hybrid dashboards that correlate normalized cost data across cloud, SaaS, and on-prem platforms with line-of-business traceability.
The final milestone was turning visibility into action. With normalization in place, the company began enforcing internal chargeback for shared platforms using usage-based allocation. Teams received forecast models combining both cloud burst behavior and on-prem usage trends.
Forecasting was improved by including renewal timelines for on-prem infrastructure, license expiration schedules, and facility capacity constraints. Budgeting became more accurate. Vendor negotiations gained leverage. Internal teams began to treat infrastructure capacity as a finite, priced resource, regardless of where it lived.
Cloud and on-prem decisions were now made using the same financial model. The playing field was level, and infrastructure strategy became outcome-driven instead of location-bound.
By extending FinOps beyond cloud and into the physical core of their infrastructure, this hybrid enterprise eliminated the blind spots that had undermined strategic planning, cost recovery, and engineering trust. The FOCUS-aligned strategy didn’t just unify reporting formats. It reshaped how decisions were made across procurement, finance, and product engineering. These are the results that followed.
Before the transformation, the company’s financial planning and analysis (FP&A) function excluded over twenty percent of total infrastructure spend from cloud cost forecasts due to a lack of visibility. On-prem costs lived in isolated ledgers and had no linkage to usage telemetry.
After adopting Scope 3 of the FOCUS standard and normalizing CapEx, depreciation, licensing, and power usage, the team exposed over $21 million in annual infrastructure spend previously missed in reporting cycles. This allowed finance teams to:
This visibility shift improved budget precision and unlocked faster decision cycles.
Before the normalization effort, forecast variance across hybrid systems was consistently above 30 percent. Engineering teams struggled to project their full usage, often modeling only their cloud footprint. Hardware refresh cycles and power draw were excluded from spend plans.
With unified data, forecast variance dropped by 37 percent in six months. Workload owners now receive holistic forecasts combining cloud scaling patterns and on-prem cost pressures. This clarity enabled:
CloudNuro enables this same variance reduction by delivering normalized forecasting across all infrastructure types, enriched with usage, commitment logic, and business context.
The company used normalized FOCUS data to launch a formal chargeback program. Instead of flat allocation or headcount-based splits, internal teams were now charged based on actual usage across cloud and physical environments.
The new model included:
As a result, platform teams had complete cost visibility. Application teams saw a direct financial impact. Engineering behavior changed because usage and cost were finally linked.
With normalized visibility into on-prem workloads, the team was able to identify aging hardware with poor cost-to-performance ratios. Some were running legacy services that had been silently duplicated in the cloud. Others were underutilized by more than 80 percent.
This insight accelerated:
Over 18 months of projected lifecycle drift were eliminated by targeting optimization efforts where normalized cost signals revealed waste.
Perhaps the most strategic outcome was executive-level adoption. Budgeting, business case development, and long-range planning could now include the full cost of infrastructure, cloud, SaaS, and on-prem, in a single data model. This enabled:
The asterisk next to “on-prem not included” disappeared from boardroom reports. Hybrid infrastructure was now visible, accountable, and aligned with product strategy.
This enterprise’s success was not just about tooling. It was about building a financial language that could span legacy and modern systems, procurement and engineering teams, and variable billing models. For any organization pursuing a unified hybrid FinOps architecture, these are the five lessons that can serve as both guidance and guardrails.
Most FinOps platforms and practices begin in public cloud because that’s where metering is easiest. But infrastructure spending doesn’t stop there. If you’re only measuring what the cloud provider sends you, you’re missing large chunks of your cost base. FinOps must reflect the full estate, not just the digital layer.
CloudNuro gives you visibility into SaaS, cloud, and on-prem spend in one unified view, removing the scope blind spots.
Without normalization, dashboards lie. Cloud may report cost per GB-hour, while on-prem hardware reports power per rack. Until your data model speaks a common language, you’ll only have fragments. Normalize units, usage, and attribution across all environments before trying to compare or forecast.
The power of the FOCUS framework is in its dimensions. When you model infrastructure using consistent labels like service, environment, business unit, and owner, you enable cross-environment clarity. This alignment turns cost into a story that makes sense to engineering, finance, and leadership at the same time.
If your product spans cloud APIs, on-prem batch processing, and SaaS orchestration, your cost reporting should too. Build views that show the complete workload path. Let teams see how services interact financially across platforms. This builds trust and drives shared accountability.
Visibility is not the final step. It’s the starting point for action. Design your cost ingestion and normalization models with downstream use cases in mind, whether it’s forecasting for budget season or chargeback for shared services. The sooner you model ownership, the faster you move from reporting to governance.
This hybrid enterprise didn’t just extend FinOps to include on-premise infrastructure. They redefined what completeness means in cost governance. By adopting the FOCUS framework across all scopes and implementing cross-environment normalization, they turned fragmented spending into a unified, allocable system of financial truth.
They no longer relied on cloud-native tools that couldn’t see physical servers. They no longer modeled product economics on partial data. They no longer exclude critical workloads from forecasting. With normalized dimensions, mapped usage, and standard cost hierarchies, they gained visibility that supported budgeting, planning, and decision-making at every level.
CloudNuro.ai enables the same level of transparency and control for hybrid enterprises. Our platform:
If your FinOps practice is hitting a ceiling because on-premise infrastructure remains invisible, CloudNuro helps you break through it.
Want to replicate this transformation?
Book a free FinOps insights demo with CloudNuro.ai and see how we unify cloud, SaaS, and on-premise cost governance into one actionable platform.
CloudNuro Corp
1755 Park St. Suite 207
Naperville, IL 60563
Phone : +1-630-277-9470
Email: info@cloudnuro.com
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