What if Every Engineer on Your Team Had a FinOps Expert in Their IDE?

What if Every Engineer on Your Team Had a FinOps Expert in Their IDE?

Introducing the Ask FI MCP Server: full FinOps intelligence delivered into GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude, Windsurf, and every AI tool your team already works in.

Cloud Costs Are Everyone's Problem. FinOps Expertise Isn't.

"FinOps expertise has always lived one tab, one platform, and one workflow shift away from the person who needs it most."

Picture this. It is 2:30 pm on a Tuesday. A senior engineer is spinning up a new Auto Scaling group. She knows Kubernetes. She knows the traffic patterns. What she does not know, because there has never been an easy way to know, is that the instance family she just chose costs 34% more than the alternative, that her team already has underutilized Reserved Instances in that region, and that this single configuration decision will compound into $9,000 of avoidable spend over the next six months.

She ships the feature. The sprint closes. The cost anomaly surfaces weeks later, buried in a billing report that nobody owns.

Most companies do not have a dedicated FinOps team. The ones that do cannot embed a FinOps expert in every squad, in every sprint, watching every infrastructure decision in real time. And so the gap between what you spend and what you should spend quietly widens, quarter after quarter, until the CFO asks a question that nobody can answer cleanly.

This is not negligence. It is a structural gap in how FinOps intelligence reaches the people who need it.

The Ask FI MCP Server is built to close that gap.

What If FinOps Intelligence Came to You, Not the Other Way Around?

This is the question that shaped how we built the Ask FI MCP Server.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard backed by Anthropic and now adopted across GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude, Windsurf, and more. It allows AI assistants to call live external services during a conversation. Not simulate them. Not approximate them. Call them, in real time, with your identity, your organization's data, and your authorized scope.

When a developer asks their AI assistant a question and it invokes an MCP tool, what happens next is not generation. It is a live API call to a real system that returns real results. The AI handles the natural language. The MCP server handles the data. The developer gets an answer.

Now consider what that means when the MCP server is Ask FI.

Your engineers already have GitHub Copilot or Cursor open. Your analysts already have Claude running. Your managers are already working inside AI tools every day. The Ask FI MCP Server connects to all of them through a single hosted endpoint. One configuration change. Under 60 seconds. Every authorized person in your organization now has the full intelligence of Ask FI available inside the tool they are already in.

No new platform to log into. No dashboard to learn. No behavior change required. The intelligence comes to them.

Not a Cost Widget. A FinOps Expert That Understands Your Entire Cloud.

Ask FI is not a wrapper around AWS Cost Explorer. It is not a chart refreshing your cloud spend totals. It is SiteSuraksha's AI-powered cloud cost intelligence layer: a system built to understand the full picture of your cloud financial posture, where your money is going, why it changed, where you are overspending, what you could be saving, and what your data is telling you that you have not noticed yet.

The difference shows up the moment you ask it something real.

A basic cost tool tells you: "Your EC2 spend last month was $48,000."

Ask FI tells you: "Your EC2 costs are up 34% this month. RADAR flagged the spike. Your top rightsizing opportunities could recover $12,000 monthly. Here is where to act first."

One is a number. The other is a decision.

What the Ask FI MCP Server Covers

Cost and Spend Analysis Query AWS and Azure spending by service, account, region, subscription, or time period. Get period-over-period comparisons. Ask why a number changed and get an answer that explains it, not just reports it.

Anomaly Detection via RADAR continuously monitors for cost spikes, unexpected usage changes, and new charges that do not fit historical patterns. When something looks wrong, Ask FI explains what changed and in which account or service. You are not just alerted. You are oriented.

Rightsizing Recommendations Surface overprovisioned and underutilized resources with specific, actionable recommendations: target instance type, expected savings, based on your actual usage patterns. Forward-looking intelligence, not historical footnotes.

Realized Savings and Commitment Utilization Understand the ROI on Reserved Instances and Savings Plans. See where commitment coverage is working and where utilization gaps are leaving money on the table.

Tag Governance Query tag coverage rates, surface untagged resources, and understand the direct cost impact of tagging gaps. Clean cost allocation starts with knowing what is missing and what it is costing you.

Budget Tracking and Forecasting Know where you stand against budget before the billing period closes, not after. Ask FI projects forward based on recent usage so surprises do not survive until month-end.

Multi-Cloud AWS and Azure. Same interface. Same conversation. No switching between tools to get the full picture.

Business Unit Scoping Every user sees only the data they are authorized to see, scoped by business unit, enforced server-side on every request. Your data governance does not weaken because someone is talking to an AI.

Real Questions. Real Answers. Every Role on Your Team.

The Ask FI MCP Server is not a developer-only tool. Because MCP works across any AI assistant (IDEs, chat tools, desktop apps), Ask FI is available to every person on your team who already uses one of these clients. The intelligence is the same. The access is scoped to each user's authorization.

An engineer optimizing infrastructure mid-sprint:

"Show me rightsizing recommendations for our EC2 fleet right now."

Ask FI returns a prioritized list with instance family, target size, and estimated monthly savings, specific enough to act on without leaving the IDE. No ticket to a FinOps team. No dashboard navigation. Just the answer and a path forward.

A team lead walking into sprint planning:

"What are our top AWS cost drivers this month, broken down by service?"

Ask FI returns a ranked breakdown with real numbers. Cost work gets on the backlog with the same rigor as feature work, because it is driven by the same quality of data.

A FinOps analyst investigating an anomaly:

"Why did our EC2 cost spike last week? Which accounts and services were affected?"

RADAR traces it. Ask FI explains it: which service, which account, which behaviour change drove the cost increase. The analyst has a fully contextualized starting point in seconds, from Claude Desktop, without opening another tool.

An engineering manager preparing for a budget conversation:

"What are our top 10 savings opportunities and what is the estimated impact of each?"

Ask FI returns a prioritized list with dollar figures. The manager enters the conversation with specifics, not estimates.

A platform team tightening governance before a new service rollout:

"What percentage of our AWS resources are currently untagged, and what is their cost impact this month?"

Ask FI returns coverage rates and the cost of the gap. The team knows exactly where governance is breaking down before it becomes a cost allocation problem.

Every one of those answers comes from the same tool each person already had open. No tab switch. No new login. No navigation sequence that breaks what they were doing. Just the answer, when it matters.

One URL. 60 Seconds. Works in Every AI Tool You Already Use.

The Ask FI MCP Server is fully hosted and production-ready. There is nothing to install, nothing to self-host, and no infrastructure to manage. Connecting is a one-time configuration change per client, not per user.

GitHub Copilot (VS Code 1.99 or later)

Create .vscode/mcp.json in your project root:

Save. VS Code detects the file automatically, no restart needed. Click the Start button above the server entry. Sign in with your Microsoft account. Ask FI is live in Copilot Chat.

Cursor

Add to ~/.cursor/mcp.json (global) or .cursor/mcp.json (project-level):

Restart Cursor. Go to Settings > Tools and MCP, click the authentication badge next to SiteSuraksha, and sign in. Or add it directly from Settings > Tools and MCP > Add new MCP server, no config file editing required.

Windsurf / Codeium

Add to ~/.codeium/windsurf/mcp_config.json:

Restart Windsurf. Sign in when prompted.

Claude Desktop

Go to Settings > Connectors, click Add connector, paste the URL, and complete the Microsoft sign-in. No config file required.

No API keys. No tokens to rotate. No SDK. No infrastructure to run.

Authentication flows through Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD), the same identity your organization already uses for Microsoft 365, Teams, and Azure. The first connection opens a browser sign-in window. Every connection after that is silent. MFA and conditional access policies apply automatically. Nothing new to configure or manage.

Enterprise-Grade From Day One. Not an Afterthought.

The Ask FI MCP Server was built for production, multi-tenant enterprise environments. Security and data governance are not features layered on top: they are the architecture.

Microsoft Entra ID Authentication Every request is verified against your organization's identity provider. No shared secrets. No per-developer API keys. No new accounts to manage.

Per-User, Per-Business-Unit Authorization Access control is enforced server-side on every request. Each user sees data only for the business units they are authorized to access, resolved at authentication time from your SiteSuraksha account configuration. It is not configurable by the end user and it is not bypassed by the AI interface.

Fully Hosted. Nothing to Operate. No server to run. No container to maintain. No ops burden to absorb. The Ask FI MCP Server is hosted, load-balanced, and production-monitored. Your team points to a URL. The rest is on us.

Multi-Tenant by Architecture Each customer's identity, authorized scope, and enabled cloud tools are isolated and resolved independently. Your data is yours.

FinOps Intelligence Shouldn't Require a Specialist. Now It Doesn't.

Think back to that engineer on Tuesday afternoon. The one who picked the wrong instance family because nobody told her there was a better option. With the Ask FI MCP Server, that conversation happens before she ships, not weeks later in a billing report. She asks. Ask FI answers. She makes a better decision. The $9,000 stays in the budget.

That is the compounding effect of FinOps intelligence at the point of decision: not a cost reduction in one sprint, but a shift in how every infrastructure decision gets made, by every person on your team, from this point forward.

Most teams will never have a dedicated FinOps specialist in every squad. But with the Ask FI MCP Server, they do not need one. The intelligence is there, in the tools they already use, answering the questions that used to go unasked.

The most powerful FinOps question is the one that actually gets asked.The Ask FI MCP Server makes sure it does.