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.

Chapters:

00:11 Meet Mike Jaco

01:11 Why Hybrid Is Forever

01:38 Regulation Drives Reality

02:55 On Prem vs Cloud Economics

03:28 The Apples to Apples Problem

04:58 Building a Common Taxonomy

06:21 Making Tech Less a Black Box

06:59 Why Allocate to Product Level

07:13 Accountability Creates Action

08:36 TBM vs FinOps Actions

10:21 18 Months vs 3 Months

11:45 Granularity vs Peanut Butter

13:16 Controllable vs Uncontrollable Spend

14:45 Carbon Becomes a Currency

17:11 Cloud Carbon Data Gap

20:39 Cost vs Carbon Tradeoffs

29:54 AI Spend and FinOps Future

37:39 Career Next Steps and Advice

39:47 People First FinOps Lessons

41:22 Where to Find Mike

🎧 Subscribe for more FinOps leadership conversations → https://www.finopsinaction.com/

Quote of the Show:

• “You can do more with the same budget.” - Mike Jaco

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-jaco/

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