Beyond the Limits of Cloud-Native Tools: A Technical Deep Dive into Multi-Cloud FinOps Challenges and Solutions

For cloud architects, FinOps engineers, and IT infrastructure leaders, the reality of multi-cloud operations is messy. Each hyperscaler (AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI) offers its own monitoring, cost management, and governance tools. Yet, in practice, stitching together these siloed native tools creates more complexity than clarity.

If your goal is to drive FinOps maturity in a multi-cloud environment, cloud-native tools will hit their ceiling. Here’s a breakdown of why and what technical leaders need instead.

1. Cloud-Native Tools Are Inherently Siloed
Every cloud provider gives you visibility within their own ecosystem:

• AWS Cost Explorer & Budgets
• Azure Cost Management + Billing
• GCP Cloud Billing Reports

These tools are powerful but only for their respective clouds. Cross-cloud aggregation? Manual. Chargeback/showback? Partial. Unified governance? Non-existent.

Problem: When cost and usage data lives in silos, teams lack a unified lens across cloud estates. Reconciliation becomes spreadsheet-driven, and policy enforcement is fragmented.

2. Native Optimization Recommendations Lack Operational Context
Each CSP offers optimization suggestions:

• AWS Trusted Advisor
• Azure Advisor
• GCP Recommender

These recommendations often:

• Ignore workloads spanning multiple CSPs
• Miss business logic, application dependencies, or contextual metadata
• Cannot enforce actions without manual approval paths or scripting

Example: Azure Advisor may recommend resizing a VM, but without correlating application performance data, SLA commitments, or integration impacts, blindly acting on it is risky.

What’s Needed: Cross-cloud optimization engines that integrate real-time utilization, tagging standards, business mapping, and cost modeling.

3. Budgeting and Forecasting Breaks at Scale
Setting up budgets across multiple cloud accounts and subscriptions is error-prone. Native tooling requires:

• Logging into each cloud console
• Configuring thresholds per account/subscription
• No global budgeting logic
• Limited tagging-based budget allocation

CoreStack Approach:

• Unified budget creation across clouds
• Assign budgets per business unit, cost center, tag, or workload
• Trigger automation on threshold breach (e.g., shutdown non-prod workloads)

4. No Persona-Based Dashboards in Native Tools
Executives, cloud engineers, finance teams, and project owners need different slices of the same truth. Native tools don’t support:

• Custom dashboards based on role
• Controlled access to specific accounts or tenants
• Aggregation across organizations

CoreStack Solution – Custom personas and dashboards for:

• CIO/CTO: Optimization trends, cloud maturity index
• FinOps: Chargeback reports, budget consumption, variances
• DevOps/CloudOps: Resource-level metrics, alerts, remediation tasks

5. Automation and Integration: The Achilles Heel
Native tools lack enterprise-grade integration capabilities:

• Limited APIs or webhook support
• No Terraform or GitOps pipeline integration
• No policy-as-code governance

CoreStack Difference:

• 847+ automation templates for common provisioning and remediation tasks
• Integration with ServiceNow, Jira, GitHub, Jenkins, Azure DevOps
• Guardrails and policies as code, executed across clouds

6. FinOps Maturity Needs Governance-Integrated Observability
Optimizing cloud spend requires:

• Observability data (CPU, memory, IOPS, network)
• Cost data
• Compliance posture
• Policy enforcement

CoreStack's FinOps⁺ integrates these domains through:

• Multi-dimensional tagging compliance enforcement
• Budget-based action policies
• Real-time workload and application observability
• Remediation flows with approval chains

7. Assessments and Continuous Optimization
Well-Architected Framework (WAF) reviews are tedious when done manually. Native tools don’t offer automation across:

• Custom workloads
• Multiple accounts and subscriptions
• Control delegation and audit trails

CoreStack Automates:

• AWS, Azure, and GCP WAF assessments
• Automated evidence collection for 30-40% of questions
• Delegated roles and persona-based reviews

Conclusion: Build Beyond Native
Cloud-native tools are foundational, but they weren’t built for FinOps at enterprise scale. Multi-cloud complexity demands:

• Aggregated, real-time visibility
• Policy-driven optimization and remediation
• Cross-functional dashboards
• Automation-first cost governance

CoreStack FinOps⁺ delivers all of this and more designed not just for reporting, but for operationalizing FinOps end-to-end.

Ready to operationalize FinOps beyond the limits of native tools?

Learn more about CoreStack FinOps⁺: corestack.io/finops.