Cloud Centers of Excellence vs. Cloud Cost Centers of Excellence

Cloud Centers of Excellence vs. Cloud Cost Centers of Excellence: What’s the Difference?

When enterprises first moved workloads to the cloud, the focus was on speed, agility, and adoption.

But as cloud spend has exploded, organizations have realized that adoption without discipline can lead to spiraling costs.

That’s where centers of excellence come in—first for cloud strategy and governance, then increasingly for cloud financial management.

In this blog, we’ll explore:

• What a cloud center of excellence (CCoE) is
• What a cloud cost center of excellence (Cost CCoE) is
• How they differ—and why they’re complementary

What is a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE)?

A Cloud Center of Excellence is a cross-functional team designed to guide an organization’s cloud adoption.

Think of it as an internal advisory board for all things cloud.

Typical responsibilities include:

• Setting governance and security standards
• Defining cloud architecture best practices
• Supporting teams with training, onboarding, and tools
• Driving consistency across departments

In short, a CCoE helps make sure the cloud is used safely, strategically, and at scale.

Most companies establish one early in their cloud journey.

What is a Cloud Cost Center of Excellence?

A Cloud Cost Center of Excellence (sometimes called a Cost CCoE) takes the same concept and applies it specifically to cloud financial management.

Instead of focusing broadly on governance and adoption, a Cost CCoE zeroes in on:

• Financial accountability — ensuring cost ownership across teams
• Optimization — identifying and actioning savings opportunities
• Forecasting & reporting — making spend predictable and transparent
• FinOps maturity — embedding cost efficiency into daily engineering work

This type of team typically emerges later, once an organization has scaled its cloud usage and cloud bills are hitting seven or eight figures.

Key Differences

Cost CCoE

• Narrower focus: cost efficiency, financial accountability, usage optimization
• Often formed once cloud adoption has scaled and spend is significant
• Measures success in savings, predictability, and efficiency
• Roles: FinOps practitioners, finance leaders, engineers

Why Organizations Need Both

A cloud CCoE without cost expertise risks enabling adoption at the expense of efficiency.

A Cost CCoE without governance risks tackling costs without addressing underlying architectural or operational issues.

Together, the two teams complement each other:

• One sets the technical guardrails
• The other sets the financial guardrails

Both reduce risk and ensure the cloud is delivering long-term value.

Cost CCoE vs. a FinOps Team

It’s easy to confuse a Cloud Cost Center of Excellence (Cost CCoE) with a FinOps team. Both focus on cloud financial management, but they aren’t quite the same thing.

• FinOps Team: Usually smaller, tactical, and execution-focused. A FinOps team lives in the day-to-day — analyzing bills, surfacing savings, working with engineers to optimize workloads, and running showback/chargeback. Their strength is in operational efficiency and embedding FinOps practices directly into engineering workflows.
• Cost CCoE: More strategic and cross-functional. A Cost CCoE often includes members from finance, procurement, cloud engineering, and leadership. Its mandate isn’t just optimization — it’s about setting policy, governance, and accountability structures that ensure cloud costs are managed consistently across the entire business.

You can think of it like this:

• The FinOps team is the engine room that drives day-to-day cloud efficiency.
• The Cost CCoE is the steering committee that sets direction, creates standards, and ensures cloud spend aligns with business strategy.

Many enterprises start with a FinOps team. As cloud maturity increases — and spend becomes material at a board level — those efforts often evolve into a Cost CCoE to create more influence, structure, and buy-in across departments.

Where to Start

• If you’re early in your journey, start with a cloud CCoE to create the right governance and security baseline.
• If you’re scaling rapidly, consider adding cost expertise early, even if it’s not yet a formal Cost CCoE.
• If you already have a CCoE, assess whether cloud costs are now material enough to justify a dedicated Cost CCoE.

Whichever stage you’re at, using frameworks like the AWS Well-Architected Framework and the FinOps Foundation Framework can help guide both types of centers of excellence.

Final Thoughts

Cloud adoption without governance is risky. Cloud adoption without cost discipline is unsustainable. And cloud financial management without strategic alignment can quickly stall.

That’s why we’re seeing organizations build on their FinOps teams with a Cloud Cost Center of Excellence — turning day-to-day efficiency into a cross-functional strategy.

The best outcomes usually come from balance:

• A cloud CCoE sets the technical guardrails.
• A FinOps team keeps spend under control day to day.
• A Cost CCoE makes sure financial accountability and governance scale across the business.

Together, they create a sustainable cloud practice where speed, security, and cost efficiency all move in the same direction.