Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Q: What do you call it when FinOps maturity surges but cloud efficiency plummets? A: An AI-nigma. I don’t claim to be a comedian. But I do claim to be Fred FinOps, so the paradoxical findings from CloudZero’s new report titled FinOps in the AI Era: A Critical Recalibration, created in partnership with B2B SaaS benchmarking firm Benchmarkit, had me scratching my head. The good news: These numbers tell a story of cloud cost maturity and control. But then there’s the bad news.

Whoever thought we’d see the day when cloud cost management (CCM) seemed easy? CloudZero just released FinOps In The AI Era: A Critical Recalibration, an annual report on the state of cloud and AI costs. The report surfaced what looks like a paradox: FinOps maturity is accelerating, but organizational cloud efficiency is plummeting. 72% of organizations now have formal cloud cost management (CCM) programs. That’s nearly double what we saw in our last survey (39%).

What do 475 senior leaders across software, financial services, cybersecurity, and other industries all have in common? They have little to no idea whether their AI investments are paying off. CloudZero just released FinOps in the AI Era: A Critical Recalibration, a report assessing the state of cloud and AI spending. Culled from hundreds of responses from people directly accountable for cloud spending, the report shows that while FinOps maturity is accelerating, cloud efficiency is plummeting.

Modern data centers rely on a growing number of specialized tools—CMDBs, ITSM platforms, network and server management systems, virtualization platforms, and more. Each solves a specific operational problem, but when these systems operate in isolation, teams face inconsistent data, manual updates, and slower decision-making. Integrating Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software with your existing tools solves these challenges by consolidating information into a single pane of glass.

Managing assets, tickets, and workflows across multiple data center sites can be complex and time-consuming. When IT service management (ITSM) and DCIM tools operate in separate silos, teams often face incomplete information, duplicated effort, and limited visibility into the physical infrastructure. Integrating Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software with ITSM platforms like ServiceNow ensures that asset, configuration, and ticket data remain aligned across systems.

You're paying Apple $0.99 to $59.99 a month for iCloud+ storage. Maybe you're about to. Either way, you're probably wondering if the pricing is fair, what you actually get at each tier, and whether there's a better option. The pricing is fine. The encryption? Not so much. Apple holds the keys to most of your files by default, which means they can access them if a government asks or if their servers get breached.