Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The most successful brands are data-driven. Whether it's Google, Amazon, or TikTok, they all use data to inform their next moves. But here's the thing. It's easy to collect a lot of data. Making sense of all that data is often the most challenging part. You can do that in three ways. Scripting is one option. Here, your developers code custom data integration tools in Python and Java alongside technologies like Hadoop and Spark.

If you’ve done any shopping around for a cloud cost intelligence platform, you may have heard about the “single pane of glass” approach to presenting cloud cost data. It’s a descriptive phrase uttered by almost every cloud cost company in one form or another. We may not all say it in a similar way, but it’s the same concept across the board.

Does it seem like your cloud costs are always shifting with the winds? It could be because the cloud itself is in a state of rapid change and advancement. The best way to anticipate these changes is to stay on top of current cloud cost news trends.

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.

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.