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.

You know this by now. You can only improve an area of your business if you measure its health and performance. Yet, rather than collecting every general finance metric possible, you’ll want to plan, collect, and analyze the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that’ll drive strategic decision-making. That means KPIs are a subset of metrics that are most relevant to your goals as a team. Here’s how to leverage the right KPIs as an FP&A team.

Cloud infrastructure and the applications it hosts generate millions of rows of raw data in short periods. Viewed in the context of everyday business activities, most of the data makes little sense. So many companies amass mountains of this type of data in data lakes and data warehouses, hoping to figure out how to use it later but end up never tapping into it.

It's been a rollercoaster ride at Twitter recently. News of layoffs with "50% higher than legally required" severance pay has dominated the news. But Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk is also trying to optimize cloud infrastructure costs. Some of the tactics used include refusing to pay a $70 million AWS bill and $8 million to a software services company. More on that below.

Merging two companies into one comes with several challenges. One of the most formidable endeavors is maintaining control over cloud costs while a cloud-to-cloud integration — essentially, taking the cloud environments of two companies and combining them into one — is taking place. One or both companies may not be tracking cost data, and even if they are, it’s highly unlikely that their cost-tracking strategies line up well enough to merge seamlessly.

Managing cloud computing costs is a big deal right now. For instance, 60% of organizations say their cloud costs are higher (over 70%) than they should be, according to our State of Cloud Cost Intelligence report. Over the last five years, several other studies have shown that controlling cloud spend is a top cloud computing challenge. Yet almost all organizations acknowledge that moving more workloads to the cloud is a top cloud initiative in the next year.

We built CloudZero for a simple reason: Bring business fundamentals to cloud-driven organizations without stifling innovation. It sounds simple, but for years, the intrinsic complexities of the cloud and extrinsic pressures to grab SaaS market share made it near-impossible for businesses to achieve this. Until CloudZero.

In software engineering, measuring your performance gives you the knowledge you need to make informed decisions regarding your products, features, processes, and even your dev teams. Measuring also tells you if you’re on track to meet your engineering goals. Yet, with an abundance of tasks, data, and other information to keep track of, how do you decide on the right metrics to monitor?

Over the past few years, Kubernetes (K8s) has become the preferred method of orchestrating containers and microservices. Its self-healing, high scalability, and open-source nature make it appealing to a wide range of users. However, deploying, running, and scaling containerized applications and microservices with Kubernetes can be quite challenging. The Kubernetes community keeps growing, but there still aren’t that many experienced K8s engineers.