Nearshore teams boost agility, but without FinOps, cloud costs can soar. This blog explores how global teams can achieve cloud cost accountability, improve visibility, and align spending with business goals through smarter financial operations.
Cloud spend is a global problem
Cloud costs are ubiquitous to doing business these days, with many cloud budgets now spanning global teams and distributed infrastructures. And, while it makes sense given our interconnected world and the proliferation of nearshore collaboration, it makes tracking cloud costs and usage more challenging. For any successful business looking to nearshore, or already engaged with a nearshore partner, managing cloud costs and optimizing spend is essential to get right to keep projects within budget and scope. Luckily, FinOps, which provides a robust framework for managing and optimizing cloud costs and usage across an organization, is rising in adoption among nearshore teams, delivering a more streamlined and collaborative approach that makes teams stronger, and nearshore engagements more successful. FinOps is a vital component of any nearshore engagement to ensure cloud cost accountability.
FinOps and why it’s crucial for nearshore models
FinOps is a cultural practice and robust framework that encourages organization-wide responsibility for the management and optimization of cloud costs and usage. No longer is it the job of finance teams alone to try and decipher cloud bills and determine where cuts or optimizations can be made, nor is it up to developers to drive cloud optimization strategies. Rather, it is the responsibility of the whole organization, driven by a centralized FinOps team, to incorporate cost accountability best practices from the beginning.
Implementing FinOps in any established organization has its challenges, but luckily a lot of those challenges might be bypassed by implementing FinOps first through a nearshore model with an experienced partner. Incorporating FinOps best practices into a nearshore engagement can serve as a model for the broader organization to optimize costs further, and works as a great proof of concept. When nearshoring, teams are already working together in unconventional ways and closely measuring aspects of spending, so adding FinOps seems like a logical next step, or first step. It makes more sense when you consider that most companies work with a nearshore partner for the cost saving potential, as compared to offshore or onshore partnerships, which can be further amplified by the cost accountability required by FinOps.
Common challenges with cloud cost management in global teams
When you do not have FinOps practices in place, managing cloud costs across global teams can be quite challenging, to say the least. For most nearshore engagements, the following can create problems:
- Lack of unified visibility across cloud providers – When you set up cloud environments in a nearshore engagement it is not always assured that other teams, or even the principle organization, is in the know. They may simply pay the bill and move on, unaware of escalating or excessive usage.
- Inconsistent tagging practices by region or team – Without a standardized tagging policy enforced across all locations, tracking cloud spend by project, owner, or environment becomes difficult. This lack of consistency can lead to orphaned resources, misattributed costs, and limited accountability.
- Engineers are unaware of the cost impact of infrastructure choices – Developers and DevOps teams often optimize for performance and reliability, not cost. In the absence of real-time cost feedback, they may over-provision resources or choose expensive services without understanding the financial trade-offs.
- Product teams shipping without cost guardrails – When product teams are incentivized to ship fast, they may bypass review processes that ensure cost efficiency. Without built-in cost controls—like budgets, alerts, and automation—they may inadvertently deploy services or scale usage that dramatically increases spend.
- Currency fluctuations and regional billing differences – Managing budgets across countries also introduces complexity due to currency exchange rates and region-specific pricing from cloud providers. Without careful monitoring, a spike in local usage can have an outsized impact on the global budget.
- Siloed responsibility for cloud spend – When finance, engineering, and operations teams don’t collaborate closely, no one truly owns cloud cost optimization. This leads to reactive cost control measures instead of proactive planning and continuous improvement.
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How FinOps brings accountability to nearshore development
FinOps delivers structure and transparency, helping teams bring cloud costs under control and address some of the issues listed above. Just like it’s important to discuss your business goals when building a nearshore engagement, it too makes sense to outline cloud cost optimization and how you are going to implement FinOps as it is not a one-size-fits-all approach.
The benefits of FinOps in nearshore engagements include:
- Cloud cost observability tools
Platforms like AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management, and CloudHealth give teams granular visibility into cloud usage and spending. With these tools in place, stakeholders across both the client and nearshore partner can monitor consumption trends, uncover inefficiencies, and make data-driven decisions. However, make sure there are systems in place to review and set goals around spending. It’s not enough to just track usage and spending. - Real-time cloud anomaly alerts across all time zones
Cloud spend anomalies don’t keep office hours. Real-time alerting ensures that usage spikes or cost anomalies are flagged immediately, no matter where your teams are located. This enables prompt action—whether from a DevOps lead in Bogotá or a product manager in Boston—to mitigate waste before it compounds.
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Embedding FinOps into Ceiba’s nearshore workflow
The right nearshore partner should be well versed in FinOps culture and best practices to ensure a successful engagement. Luckily, Ceiba has the experience and the team required to advise nearshore partners on the organization-wide implementation of FinOps. At the start of each engagement, Ceiba begins by mapping the infrastructure, business units, and cloud stack of the partner to gain a comprehensive understanding of where the company stands in terms of cloud usage, costs, and experience.
Depending on the structure of the engagement, Ceiba may put together a FinOps leadership team to oversee the widespread adoption of best practices and cultural components. From there, they work on standardizing tagging and reporting across the project to ensure alignment moving forward and to encourage more impact-driven development. Ceiba ensures most work is completed collaboratively to encourage a robust transfer of knowledge around FinOps best practices.
From cloud chaos to cloud clarity
With FinOps, nearshore teams are not treated as separate when it comes to cloud economics, but rather considered an integral piece of the puzzle. To learn more about FinOps for nearshore engagements, or Ceiba’s experience implementing FinOps, contact our team today.
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