Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

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.

Picture this. Over 90% of organizations use the cloud in one form or another, according to O'Reiley's research. Cloud computing is so popular because of its flexibility. Because you can access cloud computing resources on-demand, you can automatically increase or decrease resource usage depending on your workload, which is incredibly appealing — and quite different from traditional IT infrastructure. In 2023, controlling cloud spend is one of the greatest challenges for cloud users today.

One powerful way SaaS companies can balance their own costs while still providing plenty of value to their customers is to be strategic about pricing tiers and payment plans. When customers can choose the service levels they want at prices they can afford, and your company is compensated for its associated cloud expenses while achieving a healthy profit, you know you’ve done it right.

Today's development and operations teams are intertwined like the strands of a rope. The two heavily depend on each other to form a stronger, more solid unit. Unlike traditional teams that worked in silos, today's developers and operations’ workflows should work like a well-oiled machine. Each component needs to work together to create an efficient system that is greater than the sum of its parts.

At CloudZero, we’re pretty proud of the fact that our platform allows you to maximize your profitability by understanding your unit costs. In fact, our platform’s ability to help you easily track and analyze unit costs is one of the things that sets us apart the most from our competitors. Here is a brief breakdown of why our method of determining your company’s unit economics is so valuable and what our competitors offer — or don’t offer — in comparison.

Curious how Amazon calculates your S3 Storage Costs? Or maybe you’re wondering how you can track, control , and optimize your Amazon S3 Storage bill. This guide provides an in-depth look at Amazon S3 pricing and how to calculate your S3 Storage costs. We’ll cover all the billable elements, and the specific factors that affect S3 Storage pricing. Then, we’ll provide some simple Amazon S3 cost optimization tips that you can use to minimize your storage costs.