When Anthony Leung talks about FinOps, he’s speaking from operating at real scale — not theory. As VP of Engineering Platforms and Security Research at Forcepoint, he led a transformation that cut cloud spend in half while improving availability, and built a culture where engineers own their economics.
In a recent episode of FinOps In Full Bloom, Anthony walked through how Forcepoint operationalized unit cost metrics across the organization, and why shared visibility, not enforcement, was the turning point.
We share eight takeaways from the episode:
1. FinOps Begins With a Problem Worth Solving
Anthony didn’t come to FinOps chasing savings. He got there by confronting the challenges of managing $500 million per year in CapEx infrastructure. That kind of scale demands better decisions.
“Very small changes bring upon very large benefits for the company,” he explained. “You start to see the compounding effect.”
“Very small changes bring upon very large benefits for the company. You start to see the compounding effect.”
His background in distributed systems taught him how expensive maintaining state can be — the availability, durability, and engineering required to sustain both.
That insight reshaped his thinking: with the right data, you can make decisions that reshape how the business operates.
2. Visibility That Engineers Actually Use
Before CloudZero, cost data existed at Forcepoint but wasn’t widely used. Now it’s part of the daily routine.
“Engineers generally don’t want to ask questions. They just want to look themselves,” Anthony said. “If you create the visibility they need in a way that’s digestible, they’re just gonna go look and you don’t have to do anything.”
This is classic “data in the path of the engineer.” Remove the friction, and cost awareness becomes self-service.
To allow for that, Anthony’s team built customized views for engineering, finance, and leadership, each giving the right person the right level of detail.
The key was agreeing on a single source of truth: one cost model, one set of numbers, and one shared definition of reality. This eliminates the endless spreadsheet versioning that trips up most organizations.
3. A FinOps Platform That Keeps Up With The Business
Forcepoint’s environment spans complex product lines and multi-tenant infrastructure. CloudZero gave them tools that could keep pace.
“Where it’s a game changer is the modeling,” Anthony explained. “We can apply models to existing datasets or existing reports.”
That modeling answers critical questions: How is run rate trending? How does it map to a commit, a product, an operating plan?
That capability ties engineering work to budgets, measures impact in real time, and allows teams to shift resources quickly. When the business changes direction, the cost picture changes with it. (And, just as importantly, it’s tracked in the system.)
4. Unit Metrics Are The Operating System
Anthony’s team measures cost per user, per feature, per internal service, and per customer. In a multi-tenant environment, that level of granularity matters, because not every customer drives the same cost profile.
That’s what turned unit metrics into Forcepoint’s operating system: the place where engineering choices, pricing decisions, and customer profitability finally connected.
“Each customer may have a different profitability,” he said. “This helps drive even what discount rate a customer gets.”
These metrics aren’t side projects. They’re core to how the team operates. “Unless you have as much measurement as you can, you can’t derive what it costs you per user or per customer at the granularity that you need.”
5. Cut 50% Of Cloud Spend While Raising Availability
Yes, those two things happened together.
“In six months, we’ve managed to reduce our overall cloud spend by 50%,” Anthony said. “We actually improved our availability.”
The team focused on what was cloud native and what wasn’t. They built a top-10 hit list of services to target and asked teams to commit to improvement. But Anthony didn’t issue commands or lead with blame. He worked with teams to weigh outcomes.
He framed decisions in terms of tradeoffs: “If we take this on, this is what our opportunity cost is. If we don’t, this is what the reduction over a three-year time horizon is.”
That clarity changed the conversation. Engineers could see the consequences of each decision. They understood the tradeoffs. Cost optimization became a creative act, not a correction.
6. From Growth Mode To Profit Mode
Anthony described a transformation with clear phases: First came the push for growth, no matter the cost. Then the realization that things couldn’t keep scaling that way. Finally, the shift toward building with profitability in mind.
“Beginning was, grow at all costs,” he said. “Middle is, things aren’t going quite the way we thought they were. End is, okay, do we have a viable product?”
That shift kicked off architecture reviews, documentation, service consolidation, and a culture that treated measurement as a default. CloudZero supported that work, but the shift in thinking had to happen first.
7. Development Cost Tells A Bigger Story
Most organizations obsess over production costs. Forcepoint didn’t, and that’s what made their unit economics credible.
Anthony tracked development spend alongside production from the start, recognizing that early engineering investment often determines long-term cost structure and profitability.
“On a year-one product, your development costs versus production costs could be 40%-50% of your overall spend,” he said.
That’s a significant insight for anyone building unit economics. If you’re only measuring what it costs to run a product, you’re missing half the picture. Forcepoint tracks dev spend alongside COGS and unit metrics because early investment shapes long-term profitability.
8. FinOps Works Only When It Becomes A Shared Language
“Everybody is responsible for what cost is,” Anthony said. But shared responsibility only works when everyone speaks the same language.
That means the same tools, the same definitions, the same vernacular.
“If only one team adopts it and another doesn’t, eventually someone else will have to come clean it up.”
It also means understanding what drives your stakeholders. Some teams are incentivized to grow fast. Others are measured on efficiency. A mature product team optimizing for margin operates differently than a new product team racing to market.
“I try to have the other person’s perspective,” Anthony said. “What’s driving them? What’s motivating them?”
FinOps makes those tradeoffs visible. But the impact comes from treating your stakeholders as customers, and putting the data in front of them so they can make informed decisions.
“Ultimately, make it a data-driven decision as much as possible.”
Forcepoint’s story is a reminder that FinOps isn’t a tool rollout or a cost-cutting exercise. It’s a decision system.
When data is trusted, tradeoffs are visible, and engineers understand the business impact of their choices, efficiency stops being a mandate and becomes a default.
That’s what scaling FinOps actually looks like.
The Cloud Cost Playbook
The step-by-step guide to cost maturity
