As cloud adoption skyrockets, organizations are facing a growing challenge: managing cloud costs efficiently across multiple providers. Every cloud platform — from AWS to Azure to Google Cloud — structures its billing data differently, making cost tracking, analysis, and optimization complex and time-consuming.
This is where FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification) comes in. FOCUS is a standardized format for cloud billing and usage data, developed by the FinOps Foundation. Its goal is simple but powerful: to create a common language for cloud costs across all cloud providers, vendors, and tools. As mentioned in the State of FinOps 2025, it is expected that FOCUS will be massively adotped in 2025 and beyond. Numerous FinOps teams are eagerly looking for the v1.2 release, along with the addition of SaaS billing data support.
In this article, we’ll explain what FOCUS is, why it matters for cloud cost management, and how your FinOps team can benefit from adopting it.
Why Was FOCUS Created?
FOCUS was created to address a critical challenge in cloud cost management: the lack of standardization across cloud providers when it comes to billing file formats, naming conventions, and cost and usage data structures. Each provider—whether AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, OCI, or others—has its own unique way of presenting this information, making it difficult for organizations to consolidate multi-cloud cost data into a single dashboard, compare resource costs across providers, automate FinOps workflows, and ensure accuracy when calculating total cloud spend. By introducing a unified format that all compliant providers and tools can adopt, FOCUS simplifies data aggregation, reporting, and optimization, making these processes faster, more consistent, and more reliable.
Benefits of Using FOCUS for Cloud Cost Management
1. Standardized Billing Data Across All Providers
With FOCUS, billing data from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud follows the same structure. This eliminates the need for manual data normalization, saving countless hours of engineering and FinOps work.
2. Improved Data Accuracy and Reporting
Manual data conversion introduces errors — and when it comes to cloud costs, even small mistakes can lead to costly budgeting errors. FOCUS reduces human error by ensuring every provider uses the same naming conventions and data types, ensuring reliable financial reporting.
3. Faster Analysis and Time-to-Insight
FOCUS simplifies the data ingestion pipeline, meaning you spend less time cleaning data and more time analyzing it. This helps FinOps teams react faster to cost anomalies and spot optimization opportunities before they balloon into overspend.
4. Simplified Multi-Cloud Cost Management
Without FOCUS, comparing the cost of running a workload on AWS versus Azure or GCP requires custom scripts or costly third-party tools. With FOCUS, cross-cloud comparisons become much easier, supporting smarter multi-cloud strategies.
5. Supports FinOps Best Practices
FOCUS fits seamlessly into the FinOps lifecycle — particularly in the inform and optimize phases. By ensuring data is clean and consistent from the start, FOCUS allows FinOps teams to focus on insights and action, not data wrangling.
Who Should Use FOCUS?
FOCUS is designed for three main user groups, each with unique roles in the cloud billing ecosystem:
1. FinOps Practitioners
These are the finance, engineering, and cloud cost management teams who rely on billing data to optimize cloud spend. With FOCUS, they can:
- Access clean, standardized data without manual cleanup
- Use predefined queries from the FinOps Foundation to extract insights
- Focus on cost savings and optimization instead of fixing billing files
2. Cloud Providers (CSPs)
Cloud vendors like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and OCI are expected to generate billing data in FOCUS format. This benefits both providers and customers by ensuring billing data is:
- Easier to integrate into FinOps tools
- More transparent and comparable across clouds
- Ready for analysis immediately after ingestion
3. FinOps Tool Vendors
FinOps platforms (like Holori, CloudHealth, or Apptio Cloudability) benefit from FOCUS by:
- Reducing the complexity of supporting multi-cloud customers
- Offering FOCUS-compliant dashboards that work for any cloud
- Helping customers adopt FOCUS faster with pre-built connectors
FOCUS Adoption Trends and Challenges
When FinOps practitioners were asked “How are you planning to use FOCUS in the next 12 months?”, the responses revealed a growing interest in standardizing cloud billing data. 57% of respondents have concrete plans to adopt FOCUS, while 18% are not currently planning to use it, and 24% are still evaluating their options. Among those planning to implement FOCUS, 54% intend to automatically integrate FOCUS into their existing data pipelines, ensuring seamless data flow into their internal systems. Another 30% plan to leverage FOCUS through third-party tools or services that offer built-in support, and 16% plan to rely on manual data analysis using FOCUS-compliant data.
However, freeform responses also highlighted significant challenges to FOCUS adoption. Practitioners cited time constraints, limited internal skills, and the need for billing vendors to natively support FOCUS as key barriers. Some noted concerns like “time and resource capacity”, “technical debt and lack of SaaS providers natively exporting in FOCUS”, and “internal IT restrictions”. Despite these challenges, there is clear enthusiasm for an open-source, standardized billing specification. With the upcoming FOCUS 1.2 release, which will include SaaS billing data support, adoption is expected to accelerate as more vendors begin outputting their billing data in FOCUS format.
Cloud providers who have adopted FinOps FOCUS
Concerning the cloud vendors adoption, this is the keystone to the adoption of FOCUS. Without them Focus would just be a set of good practice but would not really be implemented.
AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI and Tencent have adopted focus and you can already download their billing data in the FOCUS format.
How to Get Started with FinOps FOCUS
Step 1: Learn the Basics
Start by taking the free “Introduction to FOCUS” course offered by the FinOps Foundation. This gives you an overview of the specification, benefits, and implementation process.
For those who want to become in-house FOCUS experts, the FOCUS Analyst Certification dives deeper into data schemas, transformation workflows, and practical use cases.
Step 2: Enable FOCUS Billing Exports
Each cloud provider is starting to implement FOCUS billing exports directly in their platforms. For example, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud already offer FOCUS-compatible exports. In AWS, you can find this in the Billing and Cost Management Console under “Data Exports.” Azure and Google Cloud have also introduced similar FOCUS-compatible exports, making it easier to standardize cost and usage data across these platforms. OCI and other providers are expected to follow, with their own FOCUS exports in development. Enabling these exports ensures your billing data is automatically formatted in FOCUS, ready for seamless ingestion into any compatible FinOps tool.
Step 3: Update Your FinOps Tooling
If you use a third-party FinOps platform, check if they support FOCUS imports. Leading tools will either support native FOCUS ingestion or provide converters to transform existing data into the standard format.
Step 4: Build a FOCUS Data Pipeline
If you manage cost data internally, you may need to:
- Set up ETL pipelines that pull billing data from each cloud provider
- Convert non-compliant data into FOCUS format
- Apply data validation rules to ensure compliance
Step 5: Join the FinOps Community
Since FOCUS is evolving, active community engagement helps you stay up-to-date. Join:
- The FOCUS working group within the FinOps Foundation
- Online forums for real-world implementation advice
- Webinars and case study presentations from early adopters
Current Limitations of FOCUS
While FOCUS is a game-changer, it’s not universally adopted yet. The SaaS providers — such as Datadog, Cloudflare, Snowflake, and Fastly — are supported by FOCUS. This means full visibility across your entire cloud stack may still require custom integrations or FinOps tools that bridge the gap. This limitation should be overcome by the release of FinOps v1.2 in June 2025 that will extend coverage for SaaS tools. As mentioned in the state of FinOps 2025, this is highly important as 65% of FinOps teams are now managing their SaaS spending alongside their public cloud costs.
Final Thoughts: Why FOCUS Matters for Every FinOps Team
In today’s cloud-first world, financial transparency and cost optimization are essential to business success. FOCUS offers a practical, scalable solution to the long-standing problem of cloud billing complexity.
By adopting FOCUS, your organization can:
✅ Reduce the time spent cleaning and reconciling billing data
✅ Improve the accuracy of cloud financial reporting
✅ Gain faster insights into multi-cloud spend
✅ Support future-proof FinOps processes as new cloud services emerge
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