Security-FinOps collaboration can reap hidden cloud benefits: 11 tips

Standardize tagging to unify reporting

As mentioned, FinOps teams are often small; as such, improving how teams access data asynchronously and communicate with a common lexicon is vital. One area worth focusing on is your tagging taxonomy, Cloudbolt’s Campos says.

To truly collaborate, security and FinOps teams must come into alignment on taxonomy standardization down to the cloud workload, he says. This standardization lets both teams view the same reports, alerts, and response patterns.

In Campos’ experience, organization silos first manifest in data structures, then leak into behaviors and lack of communication, often resulting in work that overlaps without knowing it. Moreover, security tooling often provides earlier detection of issues compared to FinOps tooling, which often delays data visibility longer, Campos says. All the more reasons to get security and FinOps teams on the same page, with the same lexicon, to ensure they can leverage each other’s work and tools to the benefit of the enterprise as a whole.