As we step into 2025, we’re thrilled to reflect on the strides we’ve made in December and all throughout the last year to empower the FinOps and cloud cost management practices of our customers. These updates mark another milestone in our journey to continuously improve your experience, providing the insights and control you need to manage cloud costs efficiently.

It might not be anywhere near springtime yet, but it’s still the perfect time to plant seeds for your brand new (or redesigned, or fine-tuned …) cost management strategy for 2025. To make sure your foundation is solid as you move forward, take advantage of these helpful resources for building and refining your FinOps practice: Think of brushing up on all this knowledge as the business version of hitting the gym for the new year.

SaaS tools enable companies of all sizes to get to market quickly, enhance their service delivery, and improve efficiency. By leveraging “ready-to-go” and “proven” platforms, SaaS companies can also avoid building systems from scratch, which is time-consuming and costly. Yet, 61% of companies have over 100 SaaS applications, which can be overwhelming to manage. Orphaned subscriptions are also common. Most companies regularly use only about half of their SaaS stack.

DevOps. DevSecOps. AIOps. NoOps. RevOps. FinOps. It’s hard to keep up sometimes. No worries, though. CloudZero sits at the intersection of finance and operations — and we recently joined the FinOps Foundation, which brings together FinOps practitioners to collaborate, learn, and network. In this guide, we’ll discuss FinOps and why it matters to you as a SaaS company that relies on cloud services and OpEx financials.

Cloud computing empowers organizations to access IT resources on demand, over the Internet, and on a pay-per-use basis. Thus, your company does not need to purchase, install, operate, and upgrade hardware for physical data centers. Instead, you can rent resources as needed from cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). For instance, AWS provides compute, storage, database, networking, machine learning, data lake and analytics, security, and IoT resources/services.

There is some controversy over Splunk’s cost. Some say Splunk is expensive. Others swear Splunk solves expensive problems. So what’s the deal? In this post, we’ll explore how Splunk pricing works in a nutshell. We’ll also share some tested Splunk cost optimization tips, including understanding costs by workload or product — just like the pros do.

FinOps dashboards help manage cloud financial operations by providing real-time visibility into cloud spending, resource utilization, and cost optimization. They are part of the broader FinOps framework, which combines finance and DevOps practices to improve collaboration between technology, finance, and business teams. This collaboration supports financial accountability and optimizes cloud costs.

In financial forecasting, looking at the past helps predict what’s possible in the future. You can plan ahead, take informed action, and avoid losing your market advantage. The finance department and other teams examine the relationships between variables to come up with more realistic financial plans. Financial forecasting can be daunting, with a vast amount of financial data to analyze, multiple teams to consult, and a range of forecasting techniques to choose from.

As cloud systems become increasingly sophisticated, you want a cloud monitoring platform that helps you identify, isolate, and fix root-cause issues. Meanwhile, engineering leaders are under increasing pressure to reduce technology costs as the global economic outlook remains uncertain. With Datadog, you can observe, monitor, analyze, and report on the health of your infrastructure, applications, and services in any cloud and at scale.

According to a recent PwC report, adopting FinOps best practices could reduce budget planning efforts by 40% by 2026. With 84% of companies struggling to manage cloud spending, FinOps is gaining traction. It helps organizations take control of cloud costs, improve financial efficiency, and drive smarter spending decisions. Finout is a FinOps platform that claims to reduce cloud costs by 30% over a year and a 50% time savings for engineers. If that is true, the next question is, how much does Finout cost?