The Cloud Only Era Is Over ft. Mike Jaco | Ep # 73
What if the biggest driver of cloud waste isn't what shows up in your billing dashboard?
In this episode of FinOps in Action, Taylor sits down with Mike Jaco, who spent years at Mastercard running one of the most sophisticated hybrid cost programs in enterprise technology. A unified TBM and FinOps practice covering a multi-billion dollar technology budget, on-prem and public cloud, under a single common taxonomy.
Mike’s core belief: most large organizations will be hybrid forever, and the industry hasn’t caught up to what that actually requires.
Here’s what they covered:
Build a common taxonomy before you do anything else. If your technology teams, product teams, and finance teams are using different languages to describe the same thing, no one is having the right conversation. Get everyone onto one shared structure first and everything else gets easier.
Allocate cost down to the product level, not just the business unit. Stopping at the business unit level leaves too much room for ambiguity and not enough room for accountability. The more granular your allocation, the clearer it becomes who owns what and what action to take.
Most large organizations will be hybrid forever, so build for it. Regulation, data sovereignty, and steady state workloads mean a full cloud migration is not realistic for most enterprises. Build your measurement framework to cover both worlds under one taxonomy or you are only ever telling half the story.
Savings that stay in the team drive more action than savings that disappear. If engineers know that any efficiency they find gets reinvested into their own backlog rather than returned to a central budget, the motivation to optimize shifts completely. Self-funding growth is a more powerful incentive than a cost reduction target.
FinOps is a people problem first and a data problem second. When an engineer is not making a change, it is almost never because they want to waste money. They are overloaded, they have competing priorities, or the task does not benefit them. Solve for the people dynamic and the technical changes follow.
“You can do more with the same budget.” - Mike Jaco
Connect with Kumar:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-jaco/
Website: https://www.toyota.com/usa
In this episode of FinOps in Action, Taylor Houck sits down with Mike Jaco, former leader of the unified TBM and FinOps practice at Mastercard, to make the case that most large enterprises will be hybrid forever and that FinOps only tells part of the story if you're not measuring both worlds the same way. Mike breaks down how Mastercard built a common taxonomy across a multi-billion dollar technology budget, why allocating cost down to the product level (rather than stopping at the business unit) is what actually drives accountability and action, and how a carbon allocation model built in parallel to cost ended up changing engineering conversations in ways that pure cost data never could.