Nick Sudarikov from InvestCloud on The Costs Hidden in Plain Sight
Why do so many FinOps practitioners miss the biggest savings opportunities, and what does getting technical have to do with it?
In this episode of FinOps in Action, I sit down with Nick Sudarikov, Finance Director of Technology Operations at InvestCloud, to break down how a background in finance and capital markets can actually make you a sharper, more effective FinOps practitioner.
Nick shares how he went from investment banker to hands on FinOps engineer, built a local AI powered stack to query billing data in plain English, and uncovered years of forgotten cloud spend hiding in plain sight.
We also cover why most cost tools will never catch your biggest waste, how to map cloud spend to real business value, and what it actually takes to have meaningful conversations with engineering teams.
Here’s what we talked about:
Why FinOps practitioners should set up their own cloud accounts and get hands-on experience with the technology
How understanding engineering workflows changes the conversation with tech teams
The hidden cost problem that anomaly detection tools will never catch
How Nick uses DuckDB, Parquet files, and AI to query billing data in plain English
Why AI is set to boost FinOps productivity by a factor of 10 and which tools risk losing market share if they don’t adapt
The importance of mapping cloud spend to business value before making any optimization recommendations
Quote of the Show:
"If you haven't started a Docker container ever in your life, probably you're missing out on a lot of things in FinOps." - Nick Sudarikov
Connect with Nick:
Website: https://investcloud.com/
In this episode of FinOps in Action, Nick Sudarikov shares how his background in finance and capital markets, combined with a deep curiosity for engineering, has shaped his approach to FinOps, and what he’s learned working across startups, cloud resellers, and large-scale enterprise environments. He explains why cost optimization is rarely as simple as what shows up in a dashboard, how a lack of technical understanding can limit a practitioner’s impact, and why getting hands-on with the tools engineers use is critical to driving meaningful change.