Financial Security in the CIA Triad (Availability)
Financial health directly dictates infrastructure availability. Uncontrolled cloud waste, runaway compute scaling, and unmonitored test deployments risk quota exhaustion and budget depletion. Crucially, abandoned cloud infrastructure represents the intersection of cost waste and critical security vulnerability: unattached EBS volumes leak sensitive database backups, idle static IPs risk subdomain takeover, and abandoned load balancers expose unpatched listener ports.
FinOps Waste Detection Vectors
Unattached EBS Disks
Volumes in available unmounted state for >14 days. Incurs provisioned IOPS charges while risking data leakage.
Unassociated Elastic IPs
Static public IPs incurring hourly cloud penalty charges while remaining vulnerable to reverse DNS abuse.
Idle Load Balancers
Application Load Balancers with 0 targets or 0 processed bytes for 21 days, costing ~$25/mo per unit.
Dangling DNS Records
Route 53 CNAMEs pointing to deprovisioned S3 buckets or Elastic Beanstalk apps vulnerable to instant takeover.
IT Asset Hygiene & Coverage Gaps
The IT asset ledger aggregates compute instances, virtual machines, clusters, databases, and network appliances. It flags coverage gaps where servers lack active BlackShield host scanners or security agents and tracks lifecycle states to isolate stale (14–30 days) and zombie (>30 days) infrastructure.