The cloud is the backbone of modern businesses, revolutionizing the trajectory of innovation, technology and business itself. While its promise of instant scalability and flexibility drives unprecedented growth, these same advantages can become a double-edged sword. The ease of spinning up new resources, automating deployments, and expanding services across regions—all of which make the cloud so powerful—can quickly lead to sprawling infrastructure and runaway costs if not carefully managed.  As organizations scale their cloud infrastructure, the complexity of managing resources and the added pressure of controlling costs has become increasingly challenging, making cloud cost management a top priority for IT leaders and enterprise operations. 

According to Gartner, global cloud spending is projected to reach $723 billion in 2025 with 90% of organizations to adopt a hybrid cloud approach through 2027. This rapid growth of cloud infrastructure and the increase in organizations expanding their cloud footprint often results in operational silos and fragmented processes. When combined with manual oversight, this creates significant blind spots in operational efficiency and increases the risk of errors and compliance issues.

Many organizations struggle to balance cost control with operational efficiency. This is where FinOps becomes crucial. This strategic approach aligns cloud spending with business goals through cost optimization and cross-team collaboration. It isn’t just about cutting costs; it’s about having clear governance, automated policies, and data-driven decision-making to ensure every dollar spent contributes to business goals. 

Automation eliminates the manual work with a standardized approach to streamlined workflows across your tools, systems and team to drive operational excellence at scale. Enter PagerDuty’s Automation which provides solutions for FinOps challenges by automating cost control, risk management, and infrastructure processes. 

Let’s explore 3 ways to use FinOps and automation to influence your organization’s ability to effectively manage their cloud cost expenditure.

1.Automated standardization of cloud operations and resource provisioning

Organizations struggle to manage cloud spend effectively, often grappling with over-provisioned resources, unused assets and inefficient manual processes that drain both time and budget. Complex architectures and isolated team practices boosting tools and operations sprawl make it increasingly challenging to implement consistent FinOps practices to manage cloud expenditure.  

Without standardized automation, organizations find themselves amongst a series of challenges overlooking the cost impact of their cloud operations. Operating in silos and making independent resource decisions without visibility into cost implications –  inadvertently, leading to unexpected overspending and causing friction between their engineering and finance teams.  

PagerDuty Automation offers a tailored solution that increases visibility and improves cost accountability through standardized, repeatable processes across operations. By automating processes, PagerDuty ensures every operation follows an approved method for resource allocation or right-sizing. This approach helps to improve variability, making it easier to track changes and manage costs while reducing extra resource needs and minimizing oversight and errors. For example, customers can automatically resize EC2 instances and remove Elastic IPs. Oversized EC2 machines and unused Elastic IPs more often than not lead to wasted cloud spend – it’s a common scenario where organizations overprovision for safety but end up with unused cloud instances that are costing them.

Some ways PagerDuty for FinOps can help you:

• Automatically identified unused EC2 EC2 machine utilization or Elastic IPs
• Eliminates and resizes as needed to align with actual usage patterns
• Simplifies resource management and reduces overall cloud spend while maintaining optimal performance.

The result? The perfect balance of cost optimization and performance with rapid remediation. 

2. Automated compliance checks and configuration verification

Without standardized compliance automation, organizations find themselves navigating a complex maze of disparate tools and processes. In highly regulated sectors, where a single misconfiguration can lead to costly violations or security breaches, organizations struggle to maintain consistent governance across their cloud infrastructure while keeping pace with evolving regulatory requirements.

PagerDuty fortifies your FinOps strategy with automation by establishing a standardized “golden path” for compliance and configuration management. By leveraging Runbook Automation to automate compliance checks, customers can ensure that system changes adhere to predefined security policies and regulatory requirements. 

These automated workflows reduce human error and mitigating risks through peer and management reviews before deployment. Mitigating risk through a secure, compliant and audit ready value approach helps prevent security breaches, while providing clear, auditable logs that demonstrate a consistent strategy. 

One common scenario is dormant Lambda functions in cloud environments that consume storage, create unnecessary complexity and costs, while increasing the risk of misconfigurations. Like any other process, manual elimination can be prone to errors and resource intensive. This maze of configurations complicates management and inflates costs. 

Some ways PagerDuty for FinOps can help you:

• Identifies unused functions and will verify their configurations against security baselines, triggering necessary reviews before any decommissioning
• Enforces compliance policies for VPC management during decommissioning while maintaining comprehensive audit logs. 
• Streamlines cloud environments by removing unused resources, which reduces management complexity overall.  

You’re left with an audit-ready environment that strengthens your FinOps strategy through consistent governance, clear audit trails, and automated risk mitigation.

3. Automated rapid remediation and continuous innovation

Alert fatigue isn’t just an annoyance – it’s a critical operational barrier that directly impacts your team’s bottom line.  In complex cloud environments, important signals often get lost in the noise, leading to delayed responses and unnecessary costs. 

Many organizations struggle with managing unplanned incidents, such as sudden budget threshold breaches, due to fragmented and manual processes. Without integrated event-driven orchestration and incident management, teams remain stuck in reactive mode, resulting in increased costs and operational disruptions.

PagerDuty transforms alert chaos into operational clarity by combining AI-powered intelligence with automated remediation capabilities. By leveraging alert grouping and automated response workflows, the platform ensures critical cost-impacting issues are identified, prioritized, and addressed before they affect your cloud budget—enabling teams to focus on strategic FinOps initiatives rather than reactive cost management.

By automating both detection and remediation, PagerDuty eliminates manual toil, prevents alert fatigue, and empowers teams with the context they need to make cost-aware decisions. This integrated approach ensures rapid remediation while driving continuous operational innovation.  

Some ways PagerDuty FinOps can help you:

• Automatically group related alerts from your hybrid environment  to identify patterns and root causes
• Initiate automated remediation workflows based on predefined thresholds and historical patterns
• Orchestrate team actions and accelerate resolution through intelligent routing and context-rich notifications
• Provide real-time visibility into cost implications of your operational decisions surrounding your cloud. 

PagerDuty Template and Prompt Library 

PagerDuty’s library offers a comprehensive collection of pre-built templates  designed to transform unplanned work into automated, predictable operations. Teams can quickly implement solutions for common use cases, from cloud cost management to infrastructure scaling and database health monitoring. Commons FinOps use-cases include managing EC2 instant sizes, removing elastic IPs, unused lambda functions and VPCs. This ready-to-use collection enables organizations to rapidly implement proven automation patterns, reduce operational risks, and drive faster incident resolution while ensuring consistent best practices across their cloud infrastructure.

Ready to transform your cloud cost management and optimize operational efficiency with automation? PagerDuty simplifies the process with pre-built automation templates for common FinOps use cases. Our solution empowers teams to quickly implement automation that delivers an immediate reduction in cloud spend, streamlined compliance and governance, accelerated incident resolution and ultimately more time for strategic initiatives.

Want to learn more? Contact us today.