From IT Support to Enterprise Cloud Leader ft. Gerard Sanchez | Ep #77
What if the best FinOps practitioners are the ones who never set out to be FinOps practitioners at all?
In this episode of FinOps in Action, host Taylor Houck sits down with Gerard Sanchez, Head of Enterprise Platforms and Cloud Technology at Resolution Life, to unpack what it actually looks like to build a cloud engineering, DevOps, and FinOps practice from absolute zero at a company that was only six months old when he joined. Gerard brings a hardcore infrastructure and networking background to a discipline that too often gets siloed away from engineering, and the results speak for themselves.
Here’s what they covered:
Set up automated cost alerts and guardrails from the start. Getting notified about a surprise bill is useful, but building automations that throttle or shut down rogue functions before the cost spiral is where you really want to be.
Tagging is non negotiable. If you can’t trace spend back to a specific application or team, you’ll never have the visibility to make smart optimization decisions.
Shift FinOps left into the architecture and design phase. Catching cost inefficiencies before they deploy is far more effective than trying to optimize them after the fact.
Match your cloud services to the actual workload. Before defaulting to high-performance, high cost infrastructure, pressure test whether the use case actually demands it. A Toyota Corolla solution often performs just as well as a Bugatti for the average user.
Keep humans in the loop as you adopt AI. Even as agentic systems get more capable, building strong permissions, tagging, and audibility into your AI framework now will save you from costly and chaotic surprises later.
"I think especially for production environments or environments that are super sensitive, there's always gonna be a human in the loop." — Gerard Sanchez
Connect with Gerard:
Website: https://www.resolutionlife.com/
In this episode of FinOps in Action, Taylor Houck sits down with Gerard Sanchez, head of enterprise platforms and cloud technology at Resolution Life, to make the case that FinOps maturity is only as strong as the foundation you build it on. Gerard breaks down how he stood up an entire cloud engineering and FinOps practice from scratch at a six-month-old company, why shifting cost visibility left into the architecture and design phase is what actually prevents waste instead of just catching it, and how embedding a technically fluent FinOps team inside engineering rather than finance is what makes optimization recommendations stick.