My name is Sam Brailli and I’m a Senior FinOps Consultant at Telefónica Tech. I support our customers from a perspective of expertise whether customers are just starting their FinOps journey or looking to refine current strategies. Enabling true collaboration to understand, reduce, optimise and manage their cloud costs through FinOps is something I’m incredibly passionate about.

Recently, I led the initiative working with a large public-sector organisation; their cloud estate is substantial, primarily hosted on Azure, with a monthly spend of approximately £240,000 (around £2.8 million annually). 

Despite the scale of their cloud footprint, they lacked the foundational elements needed to manage it effectively. There was no internal FinOps practitioner, no tagging strategy, and very little visibility into where costs were coming from. Most of their environment was running on a pay-as-you-go model; convenient, yes, but notoriously inefficient when left unchecked. On top of that, the estate was cluttered with idle and zombie resources: forgotten workloads that were still racking up charges without delivering any value.

When determining the best way to engage with the team, we took into account their budget constraints and their goal to achieve meaningful savings quickly. To meet these needs, we proposed a Propel engagement – a rapid, high-impact, and outcome-driven project designed to deliver immediate results. Instead of a long-term transformation, the focus was on a two-month cost audit: a tactical engagement aimed at delivering quick wins and demonstrating the value of FinOps. By working closely with the team, I gained a clear understanding of their challenges and priorities, collaborating to identify and implement practical cost-saving opportunities.