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.

The macro economy can put a lot of pressure on organizations to reduce costs, typically with the central SRE and platform engineering teams coming under scrutiny. One common workaround we’ve seen countless teams make is compromising their observability by ingesting fewer metrics in the name of cost savings. But for centralized SRE/observability teams, the response to macro conditions should not be monitor less, but rather monitor smarter.

Here at Pepperdata, we’ve been on a number of sales calls lately where there’s a sense of incredulity on the other side of the video screen. How does Pepperdata extract as much as 50 percent in cost savings from some of the most sophisticated clusters in the world, the ones that had already been optimized for peak performance by the most dedicated and talented IT teams? It almost seems too good to be true. It’s not.

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.