At CloudZero, we’re in the business of driving positive business change. Whenever we work with a client, our goal is to share insights rooted in our FinOps perspective and platform expertise that helps customers save on cloud costs and build strategies for engineering-led optimizations. Each experience is curated for the clients FinOps maturity stage and unique business goals; that’s what personalized service is all about.

The cloud’s elasticity—the ability to scale resources up and down in response to changes in demand—as well as variable cost structures offer significant advantages, enabling enterprises to move from rigid capex models to elastic opex models where they pay for what they provision, with engineers in control and focused on innovation, becoming true business accelerators.

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.