About

I am Ben de Mora, an independent FinOps advisor, educator, and writer based in Glasgow, Scotland. I wrote the FinOps Foundation Maturity Assessment methodology, used by AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, or by derivatives of it, to evaluate customer FinOps practice. I also co-created the FinOps Certified Professional certification, the highest credential in the discipline.

I have two decades of experience in cloud management and data centre infrastructure for large organisations. Over that period I moved from data centre engineering and platform operations into what is now called FinOps: the practice of treating cloud spend as a business decision instead of an infrastructure invoice. I have worked at companies including Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Cloudreach, Sky, Rackspace, the FinOps Foundation, Apptio, IBM Consulting, and GitLab.

In 2022 I joined the FinOps Foundation as Engineering Director and Education Principal, where I led the team that shipped the methodology. Since 2019 I have taught the FinOps Certified Practitioner course to more than 3,000 practitioners, at a 95 per cent exam pass rate sustained over that time.

As a senior consultant I have contributed to USD 100m in cumulative cloud spend avoidance for clients across financial services, media, technology, and the public sector.

The practice is technology economics: public cloud, SaaS, on-premises, licensing, and AI workload economics. FinOps is the part of it most people arrive looking for, and it is a component of the practice rather than the whole of it.

I now work independently, taking on a small number of advisory, assessment, speaking, and teaching engagements each year.

3,000+ Practitioners trained FinOps Certified Practitioner course, at a 95 per cent exam pass rate sustained since 2019.
USD 100m Cloud spend avoided Cumulative, contributed to across client engagements in financial services, media, technology, and the public sector.
20+ Years in practice Data centre engineering through to cloud economics.

Work with me Read my writing Download CV (PDF)

Credentials

FinOps Foundation

FinOps Certified Professional (2022)
FinOps Certified Practitioner (2023)
FinOps Certified Instructor (2024)
FinOps Certified FOCUS Analyst (2024)
FinOps Certified Engineer (2024)

Amazon Web Services

Solutions Architect Associate (2019)
Developer Associate (2018)
SysOps Administrator Associate (2019)

Education

BSc (Hons) Computing for Real-Time Systems, University of the West of England, 2002 to 2006