The FinOps Forensic Operator
Benjamin van der Maas
January 12, 2026
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In the relatively young landscape of FinOps, I think we are witnessing the natural evolution of enterprise FinOps practices. Where the FinOps persona once began as a generalist role is now fragmenting into specialized personas, each with unique skills and focus areas. Among these emerging specialists, to me, one stands out as irreplaceable: the FinOps Forensic Operator.
Okay, fragmentation is maybe a bit of a strong word. Bear with me, however, because the FinOps Foundation's recent framework updates reflect how the practice is maturing. We're seeing a natural split of the traditional FinOps practitioner role into more specialized personas, similar to how we see FinOps for cloud move to FinOps+ (with many scopes).
Some personas I've seen pop up in mature FinOps practices:
While each of these roles brings value, my experience has consistently shown that the FinOps Forensic Operator delivers the most direct impact on an organization's cloud journey. That's not to say that these other roles are not important and also driving value in major ways, but the FinOps Forensic Operator is the one that goes in and solves issues. That is needed in any organization; multi-cloud or single cloud, home brew tooling or off-the-shelf... A close second I believe is the FinOps Educator, but ideally this persona lives in the organization, outside of the FinOps team.
As mentioned, I've found that the work of the FinOps Forensic Operator is what truly brings in savings and operational efficiency. This role consistently delivers:
As Mike Fuller noted in his article on Cloud FinOps maturity, "The most advanced FinOps practices don't just identify optimization opportunities—they have dedicated resources who can dive deep into architectures and implement solutions."
Time and time again, this role has brought me to unique and challenging cloud architectural situations that required deep understanding and experience, but yielded great improvements for the value achieved by cloud.
This is where the FinOps Forensic Operator truly shines. Whether you build it yourself or buy it off the market, just having a great FinOps tool is not enough. Even with the most advanced tooling for showback, transparency, commitment management, and billing, you still need someone who is an elite operator of the cloud to:
The FinOps Forensic Operator is the power user of these tools, weaving through the organization to solve complex problems. They analyze, solve, and report, clearing the way for engineers to rebuild and optimize.
As J.R. Storment, Executive Director of the FinOps Foundation, observed in a recent interview, "The most effective FinOps teams have individuals who can bridge the gap between financial reporting and technical implementation—people who can translate cost data into architectural improvements."
What makes a great FinOps Forensic Operator? In my experience, this role requires a unique blend of skills:
These individuals are ideally dispatched directly by leadership to help where needed in the organization. They have a range of toolsets at their disposal:
In cybersecurity, incident responders are called in to investigate breaches, analyze attack vectors, and recommend remediation steps. They don't just monitor security tools—they actively hunt for threats and solve complex security puzzles.
Similarly, FinOps Forensic Operators don't just monitor dashboards—they actively investigate cost anomalies, architectural inefficiencies, and optimization opportunities. They're the special forces of cloud financial management.
