Deloitte's Marit Hughes: The Role of FEAR in FinOps
How do FinOps leaders make better cloud decisions when every organization is different?
In this episode of FinOps in Action, I sit down with Marit Hughes, one of the most experienced FinOps practitioners in the industry, to explore what actually drives good (and bad) cloud cost decisions.
With over a decade of hands-on experience managing cloud spend, from early AWS billing days to today’s multi-cloud, AI-driven environments, Marit shares why business alignment, communication, and fear play a far bigger role in FinOps outcomes than dashboards alone.
We also covered how FinOps changes across industries, why benchmarking often misleads teams, and how fear quietly drives overprovisioning, missed optimization opportunities, and decision paralysis.
Here’s what we talked about:
Why FinOps practices don’t translate cleanly between organizations
How fear influences cloud architecture, optimization, and commitment decisions
What FinOps practitioners get wrong about benchmarking and “best practices”
Why communication breakdowns often matter more than cost overruns
How FinOps is shifting left into planning, architecture, and strategy
What the future of forecasting looks like in a world of AI, SaaS, and variable usage
Quote of the Show:
“ If security is job zero, FinOps should be job 0.5.” - Marit Hughes
Connect with Marit:
Website: https://www.deloitte.com/us/en.html
In this episode of FinOps in Action, Marit Hughes from Deloitte explores why effective FinOps has less to do with dashboards and more to do with business alignment, communication, and decision-making. Drawing on more than a decade of experience managing cloud spend across public and private sector organizations, Marit explains how fear and uncertainty quietly drive over-provisioning, missed optimization opportunities, and decision paralysis. She shares lessons from implementing FinOps across vastly different business models, breaks down why benchmarking often leads teams astray, and clarifies the true role of FinOps as an influencer of cloud decisions. Marit also looks ahead to the future of FinOps, outlining why the practice is shifting left into planning and architecture, and how practitioners can move beyond cost control to enable smarter, value-driven cloud outcomes.