Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When it comes to storing your files or photos online, the number of choices can be overwhelming. To make things more confusing, some services focus on cloud storage and photos, and others offer both, such as Google Photos and Google Drive. But what’s the difference? Although both appear to be the same, they have some differences based on whether you need photo or file storage. Both have advantages and features to meet your needs as a photographer or for general cloud storage.

Wondering what's the big deal with Black Friday? And why does every business on earth seem to be obsessed with the quasi-holiday? Or are you just looking for great deals? Black Friday has become a sort of global cultural institution. Everyone knows about it, some look forward to it, and a few go crazy for the big day. It may be hard to believe, but Black Friday hasn't always been a thing, and it's actually a relatively recent development.

In July 2024, CrowdStrike — one of the world’s top cybersecurity companies — shipped a minor configuration update to its Windows security product. Within minutes, airlines, banks, hospitals, and retailers worldwide began crashing. The update wasn’t new code. It was a routine content file that slipped through with a bug in its safety checks. When Windows machines loaded it, the agent hit an out-of-bounds memory error and crashed. Devices blue-screened and got stuck in reboot loops.

Organisations are no longer limited to running everything in-house. The real question is where different workloads should sit to deliver the best long-term results. For many, that means weighing up cloud vs colocation. Both offer advantages over traditional infrastructure but serve different aims. Cloud makes it simple to scale and launch new services, while colocation provides predictable costs, direct control, and stronger assurance for compliance.

Cloud computing offers several undeniable benefits to businesses. Some of the biggest ones are agility, cost savings, data recovery, and developing new apps and services to meet changing customer needs. Despite these benefits, the cloud can be complex, demand specialized skills, and require companies to follow up-to-date cloud security best practices. Why?

Most cloud waste isn’t technical, it’s organizational. Harness brings finance and engineering together with FinOps practices that connect spend to outcomes, not blame. The result: 30%+ savings and alignment that scales. In too many cloud organizations, finance and engineering operate like two planets in orbit. Finance speaks in forecasts, budgets, billing codes. Engineering speaks in uptime, latency, error rates. The result?

From the time I joined CloudZero almost two years ago, one thing was unmistakably clear: the team here had built the most powerful cost allocation engine in the FinOps industry. It was also clear that this power came with something of a tradeoff. While engineers and technical FinOps practitioners loved what our YAML-based CostFormation engine could do, the experience wasn’t always simple for non-technical people getting their hands on the product for the first time.

Your CFO just asked why cloud costs jumped 40% last quarter. You pull up your dashboards, confident in your tagging strategy, until you realize 30% of your spend is labeled ‘unallocated’. This is the moment every FinOps team dreads. It reveals a hidden complexity that even mature organizations struggle with: the challenge of accurately allocating cloud costs in a way that’s both granular enough to be actionable and trusted enough to drive decisions.