Before we jump into cloud cost optimization, let us address the elephant in the room. Businesses are moving to the cloud but are struggling with unpredictable cloud bills. If you are a business owner who has moved to the cloud recently, you need to understand each cloud touchpoint and get a transparent view of your cloud services. When it comes to cloud cost optimization, there are many tools and techniques that organizations can adopt. Most of these can only take you so far.

The job of a financial planning and analysis (FP&A) professional is to oversee the building of financial models, track budgets, and partner with stakeholders across their organization to make better decisions. For FP&A professionals in charge of partnering with engineering and product organizations, this means understanding how investments in innovation, from software purchases to headcount, are driving business outcomes. Like any team in an organization, this comes with its own unique set of challenges.

Virtualization technology provider VMware acquired CloudHealth in August 2018. VMware hoped the new addition would enable more organizations to manage services on other cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and their private data centers. So, what does CloudHealth do and how much does it cost? Is it a good all-in-one platform for cloud management? This guide explores CloudHealth pricing, features, and possible alternatives to help you decide if the solution is right for you (or if there is a better option).

At CloudZero, we’re confident that we can organize cloud spend better than anyone else out there. For years, we’ve helped companies to efficiently organize spend, while overcoming traditional hurdles to visibility, like shared cost, incomplete tagging, and Kubernetes. We’ve helped customers who have struggled to attribute spend to do so in a matter of days — without saddling engineering teams with new projects or embarking on a resource tagging expedition with no end in sight.

In the beginning, companies and cloud cost management vendors focused on reducing the absolute cost of the cloud. That would be the equivalent of solely focusing on the total cost of a sales organization versus considering how much new revenue they were booking, or the productivity of the sales team or the cost of customer acquisition. As cloud spend followed its rapid growth trajectory, curbing it most often relied on discounts.

One of the best features of the public cloud is that it utilizes a model that enables multiple organizations to share cloud resources. This approach leverages economies of scale, ensuring each tenant sharing those resources receives a lighter bill than if they utilized a private cloud dedicated to just them. Likewise, multi-tenancy in cloud computing is cloud architecture that enables multiple organizations/customers/users to share resources like virtual machines, storage, and server components.

When you’re already strapped for time and bogged down by cloud bills that seem higher than they should be, you may not be inclined to devote months to researching the best cloud cost tools. And unless you’ve used a cost tool before, you may have no idea where to start. What happens if you use multiple cloud providers? Is one payment scheme better than another? And what do you do if your company hasn’t stayed on top of tagging?

Your job as a Chief Financial Officer (CFO) carries a lot of weight, regardless of the size and industry of your organization. Among other responsibilities, you are directly accountable for ensuring your company's financial health by providing accurate, up-to-date, and actionable insights. Now, if your revenue comes from recurring subscription revenue, SaaS metrics form the backbone of your business. They measure your profitability and growth.

This is no secret to you. It costs up to seven times more to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one. Upselling an existing customer is also easier than upselling to a new one. So, keeping customers will increase your revenue and profitability. Not to mention, current customers are likely to buy more goods and services than new ones. But that's not all. The longer you keep a customer, the higher their Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) grows, thus maximizing your return on investment.