Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Women leaders from CloudZero, Campfire, and Preql AI sat down to talk about what it actually takes to modernize finance in 2026 — AI spend, smarter tooling, and the skills that matter now for finance practitioners and executives looking to manage cloud and AI spend in a rapidly changing and unpredictable financial environment. On March 19, 2026, CloudZero and Campfire co-hosted a virtual panel in honor of International Women’s Month, called Building the Finance Function for the Future.

A real workflow showing how Claude + CloudZero MCP turns plain-English questions into actionable cost intelligence — no dashboards, no tickets, no waiting As Director of Finance and Accounting at a software company, my job can be described simply: Understand what we’re spending, who’s responsible, and whether we can get more efficient. But as anyone who’s had to wrangle AI costs knows, doing so for AI is anything but simple.

We hear a lot of war stories from the teams we work with. Horror stories about cloud bills, surprise overages, and the infrastructure decisions that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. This one comes from Erik Dasque, CTO at Allure Security. It involves a junior developer, a Kubernetes CronJob, and a recurring bill that, if not caught, would have happened on a yearly basis.

Not long ago, cloud cost was an engineering problem. FinOps teams owned it, finance leaned in occasionally, and everyone else stayed out of it. Now, that’s changed. AI changed who has skin in the game. CFOs get asked about it in board meetings. CEOs field questions on earnings calls. The audience for cloud cost management has exploded — and that means the conversation CloudZero is built to enable isn’t only a technical one, it’s a business one.

JC, the Director of Software Engineering, Cloud at LogicMonitor, shares how Cost Optimization enabled his team to shift to Cost-Intelligent Observability and tackle an unexpected and growing cloud bill. As engineers, we live and breathe performance. We obsess over latency, reliability, and uptime, the hallmarks of a healthy system. But there’s another metric that’s becoming just as critical: cost.

Back in May of 2021, containers had already won. Kubernetes adoption was surging. ECS and EKS were powerful. But for many teams, deploying a simple containerized web service still meant stitching together clusters, networking rules, scaling policies, load balancers, IAM roles, and CI/CD pipelines. It felt heavier than it should. Developers no longer wanted more orchestration power. They wanted less operational drag.

To watch the full walkthrough video on the Pepperdata self-service install, click the link here. Many organizations struggle to efficiently manage their cloud costs, and that arises from difficulties in managing Kubernetes resources. Of the $419 billion spent on cloud infrastructure in 2025 (Synergy Research Group), Flexera estimates that 27% of all of cloud spend is wasted due to overprovisioned resources.

Like most SaaS companies, CloudZero uses its own product. When we released cost per customer reporting, we tested it on ourselves first. And today, we use cost per customer reports regularly. Why? Because they help leadership answer board and renewal questions, including customer-level margins. Cost per customer is valuable and hard to get right. Multi-tenant systems and Kubernetes can hide the link between shared infrastructure (like EC2) and the customers using it.

Modern FP&A tools help SaaS businesses analyze financial performance in real time, forecast accurately, and align spend with business priorities — especially cloud spend, which can quickly spiral without visibility. Choosing the right FP&A tool for your business means understanding what you actually need it to do — whether that’s cloud cost visibility, more accurate forecasting, or tighter alignment between finance and engineering.

Welcome to March’s Cloud Economics Pulse, CloudZero’s monthly look at cloud spend as AI moves from cost line item to cost problem. Two things landed in February that are worth holding together. Last month’s Pulse established a new baseline, calling it a floor, not a ceiling.