Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Accurate, fair budgets make everyone in the company happy. Engineers love when they can build products that make the company money, executives enjoy seeing nice, wide margins, and finance departments celebrate when everything goes according to plan. But keeping the budget for cloud computing reasonable can seem like a lofty goal when your company’s cloud spending seems to change with the direction of the wind.

The age of growth-at-all-costs is over. Profitability matters — and it matters now. For SaaS companies who rely heavily on the public cloud, understanding what’s driving (or hurting) profitability can be tricky. Different customers have different needs and usage patterns, drive different levels of cost, and impact profitability unequally. Cybersecurity has played a central role in CloudZero from the beginning —or really, before it.

Managing gas bills has a lot in common with managing cloud spend. In the summer, our gas bill increased with our summer adventures. Sitting home with the kids out of school and the warm summer months was not an option. Likewise, while discounts on gas certainly help, in reality they do not put much of a dent in the overall bill. The cheapest gallon of gas is still the one not used. If you’re a modern cloud-native business, you can’t just stop using the cloud.

When you’re operating in the cloud, making the right decisions is not always easy because there’s a lot of ground to cover, especially with regard to cost. The elastic nature of cloud infrastructure means your costs could quickly spiral out of control if you don’t have guardrails in place to help keep costs down. Properly managing your cloud costs is important, especially for SaaS companies. Cloud spend impacts your COGS, which in turn affects revenue and valuation.

Great leaders know how to think big. As a VPE or CTO, your leadership role puts you in a position to make important changes and guide policy. But as a technical leader of your company, you’re almost always incredibly busy. It’s impossible to handle every single demand on any given day, which makes prioritization of tasks an important part of your daily decision-making. How do you know you’re making the right choices and working on the items that will make the largest impact?

Let’s imagine, for a moment, that we live in a perfect world. In that world, you could check your company’s cloud bills and financial reports and find cleanly organized categories of spending that help you instantly understand where your money is going and why. Your engineers would meticulously label every spend item with useful metadata tags so you can clearly see which costs have increased and which are most affecting your bottom line.

You work hard to deliver a great product to your target market. Yet, when it’s time to price your worth, it’s challenging to set a fair pricing strategy, model, or amount. This anxiety is understandable. If you charge too much, you could lose potential and existing customers. If you are a start-up, this bad first impression can be detrimental to your growth. For larger businesses, some customers may feel you are losing touch and switch to newer or veteran competitors.

In the beginning of cloud computing, before the earliest cost tools came along to give companies a glimpse into their spending, most businesses found it hard to determine where their cloud budget was going. The money disappeared into the black hole of the cloud service provider, and in exchange, the business received cloud services. Achieving any sort of granularity beyond that was next to impossible.

Apptio announced on May 31, 2019, that it had acquired Cloudability, hoping to strengthen its mission through its new product. Cloudability is a multi-cloud financial management platform for enterprises looking for a more unified way to view, understand, and act on cloud cost insight. Cloudability lets enterprises analyze cloud costs across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Apptio Cloudability provides FinOps capabilities as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

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.