Who is best positioned to implement infrastructure changes to optimize usage?

• A. Central team only
• B. Decentralized application owners, empowered by the central team with recommendations
• C. External consultants only
• D. Finance auditors.

Answer: (B)

In this area, those who own each application are best positioned to drive infrastructure optimization, because they know the actual usage patterns, performance needs, and constraints of their workloads. The central FinOps or cloud-cost governance team supplies data, patterns, guardrails, and best-practice recommendations, ensuring consistency and policy alignment across the organization. When application owners have the authority to act on these recommendations, they can implement concrete changes—like right-sizing instances, enabling autoscaling, scheduling non-production workloads, turning off idle resources, and selecting appropriate storage classes—more quickly and with the proper context. This collaboration combines accurate, context-rich execution with strong governance.

External consultants or auditors can provide valuable input, but they don’t own ongoing optimization within the day-to-day operations. A central team alone often lacks the granular context needed for each workload. The chosen approach—decentralized application owners empowered by the central team with recommendations—balances autonomy with guidance, making optimization more effective and sustainable.