The FinOps Certified Service Provider certification is available to FinOps Foundation members that provide FinOps consulting and professional services for organizations that include offerings, deliverables and outcomes aligned to the FinOps Framework Capabilities. FinOps Service Providers enable FinOps Personas to perform FinOps activities and adopt FinOps best practices.
Please contact member-cert@finops.org to request a Request for Information (RFI) document and kickstart the certification process for your FinOps tool or FinOps professional services offering.
Required Criteria for Certification
Become a Member (Prerequisite)
Being a FinOps Foundation Member and Linux Foundation Member in good standing are prerequisites to becoming a FinOps Certified Service Provider.
Individual Certification Requirements
Demonstrate your team’s knowledge and FinOps expertise through FinOps training and certifications.
The FinOps Certified Service Provider certification requires individuals in your organization to have achieved FinOps Certified Practitioner and FinOps Certified Professional certifications based on your organization’s size.
The following table outlines the number of certified individuals your organization requires for each type of certification. Note that one FinOps Certified Professional certification does not substitute for any FinOps Certified Practitioner certifications.
| FinOps Service Provider | |||
| Company Size | FinOps Certified Practitioner | FinOps Certified Professional | FinOps Certified FOCUS Analyst |
| 5,000 + | 100 | 5 | 50 |
| 500 – 4,999 | 50 | 3 | 25 |
| 100 – 499 | 10 | 2 | 5 |
| Less than 100 | 5 | 1 | 3 |
| The “Company Size” column in this table refers to the parent organization size that was used for defining your fee structure when you joined the Linux Foundation and counts are not based on the individual business unit. For example, a 100 person product team that is part of a 1,500 person organization would fall into the “500–4,999” individual certification requirement tier, and not the “100–499” individual certification requirement tier.
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FinOps Framework Requirements
The FinOps Framework provides the operating model for how to establish and excel in the practice of FinOps.
The FinOps Certified Service Provider certification requires publicly referenceable (or submit written) Services Descriptions or Statement of Work documentation outlining FinOps service(s) scope, deliverables, timelines and outcomes that align to the required Framework Capabilities.
Each Framework Capability is assigned a FinOps service provider value that is weighted in the context for how professional services offering(s) enable the FinOps Capability for FinOps Personas. The criteria value is not a reflection of the FinOps Framework Capability’s value in the practice of FinOps.
FinOps Service Provider professional services offering(s) are evaluated and counted as a point-value based on publicly referenceable evidence for alignment with the corresponding FinOps Framework Capability. This means the FinOps Service Provider offering is assessed as either meeting the Framework Capability criterion (full point-value) or not meeting it (zero point-value), with no intermediate point-value level.
The FinOps Certified Service Provider certification requires a FinOps service provider to reach a threshold of [ 90% ] of the total possible required criteria points from combining the points achieved in the (i) Required Criteria for Certification section with the points achieved in the (ii) Supplemental Criteria section.
Understand Usage & Cost
How do your consulting services enable the following FinOps Capabilities for FinOps Personas?
Data Ingestion [service provider criteria points: 1]
Capability to enable collection, transfer, store, and normalization of data from various sources, with a goal of creating a complete, contextual dataset of technology usage and cost data available for analysis.
Allocation [service provider criteria points: 3]
Capability to assign and share technology costs using accounts, tags, labels, and other metadata, creating accountability among teams and projects within an organization.
Reporting & Analytics [service provider criteria points: 5]
Capability to enable analysis of technology related data for creating reports to gain insights into usage and spend patterns, identify opportunities for improvement, and support informed decision-making about technology resources.
Anomaly Management [service provider criteria points: 1]
Capability to detect, identify, alert and manage unexpected or unforecasted technology costs and usage irregularities in a timely manner to lower risk in cost-effective operations.
Quantify Business Value
How do your consulting services enable the following FinOps Capabilities for FinOps Personas?
Planning & Estimating [service provider criteria points: 5]
Capability to estimate and explore potential cost and value of workloads in an organization’s technology environments for particular scenarios and models.
Forecasting [service provider criteria points: 5]
Capability to provide or create a model of the anticipated future cost and value of systems and services leveraging statistical methods, historical spend patterns, planned changes, and related metrics.
Budgeting [service provider criteria points: 5]
Capability for setting limits, monitoring, and managing technology spending, aligned with business objectives, to ensure accountability and predictable financial outcomes for systems and services.
KPIs & Benchmarking [service provider criteria points: 3]
Capability to evaluate resource optimization and value between parts of the organization or against industry peers to inform decision-making and align FinOps with business objectives.
Unit Economics [service provider criteria points: 5]
Capability to develop and track metrics that provide an understanding of how an organization’s technology use and management practices impact the value of the organization’s products, services, or activities.
Optimize Usage & Cost
How do your consulting services enable the following FinOps Capabilities for FinOps Personas?
Architecting & Workload Placement [service provider criteria points: 5]
Capability to enable design and modernization of solutions with cost-awareness and efficiency to maximize business value while achieving performance, scalability, and operational objectives.
Usage Optimization [service provider criteria points: 3]
Capability to analyze and optimize resources to match specific usage patterns while ensuring that workloads operate efficiently and generate sufficient business value for their cost.
Licensing & SaaS [service provider criteria points: 3]
Capability to optimize the impact of software licenses and SaaS investments on an organization’s technology cost and value structure by understanding vendor-specific licensing terms, use rights, and pricing options, planning for appropriate use aimed to minimize over-deployment (a compliance risk) or under-deployment (shelfware/waste).
Rate Optimization [service provider criteria points: 5]
Capability to enable and manage resource rate efficiency through commitment discounts (RIs, Savings Plans, Committed Use Discounts), and other pricing mechanisms (Spot, interruptible VMs, cost aware region selection) to meet the organization’s operational and budgetary objectives.
Sustainability [service provider criteria points: 3]
Capability of incorporating sustainability criteria and metrics into optimization, to ensure environmental efficiency is balanced with FinOps practices.
Manage the FinOps Practice
How do your consulting services enable the following FinOps Capabilities for FinOps Personas?
FinOps Practice Operations [service provider criteria points: 5]
Capability of enabling a FinOps culture and empowering the FinOps practice through the implementation of FinOps strategy and processes.
Executive Strategy Alignment [service provider criteria points: 5]
Capability of enabling FinOps teams to partner with executive leaders to support executive strategy alignment of technology-related spend through clear decision support, shared accountability, and business-relevant measures.
FinOps Education & Enablement [service provider criteria points: 5]
Capability of providing FinOps training, skill development, and practical activities that enable teams throughout the organization to adopt and deliver FinOps best practices.
Governance, Policy & Risk [service provider criteria points: 5]
Capability to establish policies, controls and governance mechanisms to ensure that technology use aligns with business objectives, complies with regulatory requirements, and optimizes resources efficiently.
Invoicing & Chargeback [service provider criteria points: 5]
Capability to enable invoice reconciliation workflows and chargeback models to align cost data and reporting to specific budgets and accounting requirements.
FinOps Assessment [service provider criteria points: 5]
Capability to conduct repeatable, measurable analysis of the maturity of a FinOps practice in the context of the FinOps Framework for insights into strengths and areas for improvement of FinOps activities.
Intersecting Disciplines [service provider criteria points: 3]
Capability to enable coordination of activities between FinOps and interconnected disciplines and Allied Personas (such as, ITAM, ITFM, Sustainability, Security).
Supplemental Criteria (Optional & Additional)
Do your consulting services have a specific FinOps concentration, provide support for multiple data providers, or meet relevant compliance requirements?
FinOps for Technology Categories [criteria points: 3 for each Technology Category]
This criteria is about enabling the practice of FinOps beyond public cloud.
Data Providers Supported [criteria points: 1 for each data provider]
This criteria includes public CSPs (like Google, AWS, Azure, Oracle, etc), data cloud providers (Snowflake, Databricks, etc), SaaS, data center, and private cloud infrastructure (like OpenStack, etc).
Compliances [criteria points: 3 for each compliance]
This criteria includes compliances for FedRAMP, GDPR, SOC 1 (Type I or II), SOC 2 (Type I or II), ISO 27001
Technology Concentration [criteria points: 10]
This criteria is for FinOps tools and professional service providers whose software functionality or consulting services exclusively concentrate on a single specific technology (like K8s, or storage optimization for data lakehouses, or automated provisioning/management of interruptible VMs, etc…), or single specific FinOps activity.
Community Engagement [criteria points: 5]
The FinOps Foundation is here to advance the people who do FinOps. Provide information that satisfies the following criteria:
- FinOps Foundation member profile page lists 3 publicly referenceable customer case studies
