Want to hear a sad but true fact? 70% of companies overshoot their cloud budgets. Why is that? Although the cloud is a mighty tool for speed, scalability, and innovation, the inability to see costs can lead companies to limit cloud usage, which hampers innovation and puts them at a disadvantage against the competition. Rather than limiting cloud usage, adopting the FinOps approach provides the insights you need to feel confident about your cloud costs.

Rethinking Cost Optimization Cost Optimization is a term that has been around for a while when discussing Cloud cost, and to a larger extent the practice of FinOps. It is usually what most people associate with FinOps when they hear those terms initially, but is that the correct term to use?

Managing cloud costs has become a must for FinOps-focused businesses. Gotta keep a close eye on those expenses! So, what is the best way to do it? Find a platform that can help you get cost visibility and catch any cloud costs anomalies before they turn into a money waste! With tons of FinOps tools, how do you figure out which one suits your needs? And what exactly should you be looking at? We get it! There’s much to consider when picking the best platform to get those cloud cost insights.

A recent report found that managing cloud costs, alongside resource usage, is the most pressing cloud management challenge for the fifth straight year. This makes sense, considering respondents said a staggering 32% of their cloud budget went to waste in 2022 alone. It doesn't end there. The following FinOps statistics also demonstrate the value of the cloud for many organizations.

By now FinOps has proven its value — so much so that the web is full of helpful in-depth guides, broad overviews, bite-sized articles, and resource lists on the subject. But if you're preparing to pitch a FinOps program at your company, you need to convey only the most important points in a way that's both impactful and succinct. That's when it's time to call in the visuals.

One of the first considerations for FinOps teams trying to lower their public cloud spend is investing in long-term savings vehicles available from their Cloud Service Provider. These programs can provide customers with upwards of 72% savings off on-demand prices, in return for a 1-to-3-year usage commitment, so it’s pretty common that we see them in use by our customers.

Cloud financial management has become an increasingly sophisticated business function over the past few years, far beyond what many cloud stakeholders anticipated. As a result, many companies are unable to monitor and allocate cloud costs accurately. In 2022, Gartner estimates companies will waste as much as 30% of their cloud budgets due to this problem. A more holistic approach to cloud cost management is necessary to reduce waste and optimize cloud spending.

It’s never been a better time to be a Managed Service Provider (MSP). Why? Small and medium businesses (SMBs) use cloud-based services for their operations. Eighty-eight percent say they currently use an MSP or are considering one. But many obstacles remain even if SMBs are in high demand for MSPs. They need to keep their profits and revenue growing, focusing on cloud unit economics, customer pricing strategies, and efficient operations.

Cloud computing was originally pitched as a cost-savings alternative to traditional IT infrastructure. The concept was simple: only purchase what you need and adjust those resources up and down based on demand. This eliminated large up-front costs and made it possible to right-size the amount of compute and storage infrastructure based on a specific workload. While that might have been true in the beginning, CIOs are finding themselves in a different situation today.

Effective CloudOps teams can control costs, improve security, optimize resources, and provide superior services across their cloud environments. These teams can also leverage FinOps, the cross-functional cloud financial management discipline and cultural practice that promotes visibility and collaboration to help organizations manage, optimize, and predict their cloud spend.