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“With IBM Cloudability, our FinOps team can centralize cost data, analyze spending trends, and generate insights that are meaningful both to technical teams and business leaders.”
Global law firm DLA Piper wanted greater control and visibility over its growing cloud spend. By only using native Azure cost tools DLA Piper faced difficulty understanding spending patterns and communicating financial insights effectively to business leaders. By adopting IBM Cloudability, the firm transformed its cloud financial management approach, achieving measurable savings, improving cost transparency, and fostering collaboration across IT, finance, and business teams.
DLA Piper is a leading global law firm, with over 1,000 corporate lawyers and offices in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia Pacific. The company helps trailblazing organizations seize business opportunities and successfully manage growth and change at speed. Founded in 2005, the firm helps clients execute complex transactions and has been ranked #1 in global M&A volume for 15 consecutive years.
Technology plays a crucial role in supporting client services and internal operations at DLA Piper, and the company has a growing cloud presence. Before adopting Cloudability, the firm relied on Azure’s native cost management tools for tracking and reporting. While these tools provided basic visibility, they lacked detailed transparency and offered little in the way of meaningful analysis or actionable insight.
Without financial transparency, it was difficult for teams to understand their usage and stay aligned to budgets. Management lacked clear visibility into total spend, and service owners had no easy way to see or take responsibility for their consumption. Forecasting future costs was equally challenging. It was clear the firm needed a better solution to manage its growing cloud environment.
To address these challenges, DLA Piper implemented Cloudability. The decision marked a major shift in how the firm approached cloud financial management. Honey Pupneja, Cloud Engineer and FinOps Analyst at DLA Piper, summarized the changes. “With IBM Cloudability, our FinOps team can centralize cost data, analyze spending trends, and generate insights that are meaningful both to technical teams and business leaders,” she said.
Through Cloudability’s rich analytics, Pupneja explained, DLA Piper was able to design intuitive dashboards and flexible reports tailored to different audiences. Service teams gained detailed views of their own budgets and consumption, allowing them to monitor usage and make informed adjustments throughout the month. At the same time, executive-level dashboards provided management with clear, concise summaries focused on the metrics that mattered most to them. The firm also began developing forecasting models that projected cloud costs, enabling better planning and resource allocation.
Within a year of adopting Cloudability, DLA Piper realized substantial financial savings. The firm gained the visibility it needed to identify underutilized resources and take corrective action through rightsizing. With better insight into usage patterns, the team was also able to invest confidently in reserved instances, reducing hourly rates and overall operational costs. These improvements brought immediate value and validated the decision to adopt Cloudability as a core FinOps tool.
“When we started our cloud journey, we were not focused on savings, rightsizing, or reservations,” Pupneja said. “We were just building infrastructure. Nobody took responsibility for the financial side until we saw that we were spending a lot. Then, IBM Cloudability came into the picture and helped us see where we could save.”
Cloudability also transformed how financial information was shared with leadership. Previously, executives struggled to interpret raw cost data or overly detailed reports. With Cloudability, DLA Piper could now present clear, visual summaries of total monthly spend, savings achieved through optimization, and spending trends across regions and services. This clarity made discussions around budgeting and resource management more productive and data-driven. As Pupneja noted, management “just wants the big numbers,” and Cloudability made it easy to give it to them, along with relevant insights, in a format that supported high-level decision-making. “IBM Cloudability is a good tool where, if you want to show data to executives who don’t need high granularity, they just want to see the big numbers—the millions—you can present it in such a way that they understand,” she said.
One of the most important cultural shifts came from prioritizing financial accountability. Each service owner was given access to personalized dashboards showing their respective budgets and actual usage. This visibility made it easier for teams to stay within budget, forecast future expenses, and take responsibility for their financial impact. The initiative encouraged a proactive mindset where financial discipline became part of daily operations rather than an afterthought.
The adoption of Cloudability also broke down barriers between departments. For the first time, IT, business, and finance teams had a single source of truth for cloud financial data. With everyone looking at the same numbers, discussions around cost management became collaborative rather than simply reactive. This alignment ensured that spending decisions were both technically and financially sound, promoting a shared understanding of how cloud investments supported the firm’s strategic goals.
Having built a strong foundation for cloud financial transparency, DLA Piper is now focusing on forecasting and governance. The next phase of the FinOps journey involves adopting more advanced prediction models for cloud spending and establishing stronger guardrails to prevent budget overruns. The team also plans to continue expanding the use of dashboards and automated reporting through Cloudability to make insights even more accessible across the organization.
According to Pupneja, Cloudability has enabled DLA Piper to drive significant cost savings and value for the firm. “I perfectly love IBM Cloudability,” she said. “Hands down, it’s the best FinOps tool.”
Discover how IBM Cloudability can bring cost transparency to your organization.
Discover how DLA Piper elevated its cloud financial management with IBM Cloudability. FinOps Analyst Honey Pupneja explains how the team moved beyond basic native tools to achieve clearer reporting, smarter optimization, and meaningful savings.
See how DLA Piper strengthened cross-team accountability and gained clearer cloud cost visibility with IBM Cloudability. FinOps Analyst Honey Pupneja shares how unified reporting, guardrails, and actionable insights helped the firm optimize spend and make confident financial decisions.
