Over the next five years, the cloud computing market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.3%. Cloud-based services are becoming increasingly popular with businesses of all sizes, contributing to the growth of this market. When you consider the other benefits involved, that makes a lot of business sense.

From 2022 to 2023, worldwide cloud spending is expected to increase to $597.3 billion, up from $491 billion in 2022. Year over year, that’s a 21.64% increase. Compare that to the 15.42% increase (at the time of writing) in the Nasdaq-100 Technology Sector Index, and you see a simple, inconvenient truth: Cloud spend is outpacing business growth by a substantial margin. It’s no wonder that cloud efficiency sits at the top of many companies’ priority lists.

The trend continues to accelerate - even faster now. Cloud computing was already booming before 2020. But in the following two years, remote work flourished, and cloud adoption soared. Some companies have since returned to the office. Others are adopting hybrid models, where staff work from home and in the office. Yet there’s more to the rise and rise of cloud computing than remote working.

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.

Cloud financial management has become an increasingly sophisticated business function over the past few years, far beyond what many cloud stakeholders anticipated. As a result, many companies are unable to monitor and allocate cloud costs accurately. In 2022, Gartner estimates companies will waste as much as 30% of their cloud budgets due to this problem. A more holistic approach to cloud cost management is necessary to reduce waste and optimize cloud spending.