Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Picture the last time you were sitting at your desk trying to make sense out of the multiple cloud provider bills you just received. The amounts all change from month to month, and you can’t really compare them against each other because they all use different formats. To say this is a confusing and frustrating situation to be in is an understatement. Perhaps you’re there now, which is why you’ve searched for advice on multi-cloud cost management.

But many businesses don’t have insight into where that money goes and whether or not they’re pricing their products accordingly. CloudZero Founder and CTO Erik Peterson sat down with Erik Carlin, Founder and CPO at ProsperOps, to talk about the transition in cloud cost optimization from 1.0 to 2.0. They explored what data engineering teams need to make informed buying decisions, how to turn data into actionable intelligence, and why you should view cloud costs as an opportunity for ROI.

CloudZero’s research has determined that as many as 60% of SaaS business leaders feel their cloud spend is higher than it should be. Considering cloud spend is a dominant portion of a SaaS company’s operating costs, unexpectedly high cloud bills can be a significant problem. While many SaaS leaders use discount plans to stem the bleeding, we believe the better solution lies with giving your engineers the tools to track and optimize costs as they build.

CloudZero just closed at $32M Series B fundraising round in the weakest funding environment since the dawn of the pandemic. The round was led by Innovius Capital and Threshold Ventures, with continued support from existing investors Matrix Partners, Underscore VC, and G20 Ventures. CloudZero is a SaaS product, a data-dense platform delivered via the cloud, mostly to other SaaS companies and digital native businesses (DNBs).

This isn’t the “good old days” anymore. It used to be that cloud companies could pursue growth at all costs and still garner the support of venture capitalists and other investors. In 2023, however, with costs rising and margins getting narrower every day, investors are now favoring companies that can ensure long-term profitability rather than just growth. Now, more than ever before, it’s crucial to drive toward SaaS profitability as the ultimate goal.

If you’re going through a merger or an acquisition, you’ll soon have to assemble all the cloud account data from two or more organizations and blend it together to fit your new, larger organization. You may be bringing the companies together to form a new entity or simply absorbing one company into the other; the details don’t matter, because the solution is the same either way.

DevOps and Agile are some of the most prominent concepts in modern IT. Agile emerged at the turn of the century to help development teams become more efficient than with previous approaches. Several years later, around 2010, DevOps emerged as we know it today to enable development and operations teams to deliver better software products, more quickly, and together. These two approaches have a lot in common, including inflated expectations.

At CloudZero, we’re always talking about different ways you can save money and increase your cloud cost efficiency with our platform. From choosing the best provider discounts for your situation to spotting cost trends that have gone off the rails or boosting the metrics that are most important to investors, we’ve discussed numerous ways you can use CloudZero to your company’s financial advantage.

Every day, CloudZero helps SaaS companies understand their cloud environments and take consistent steps forward on the journey to cloud cost maturity. We discuss this a lot on our blog. What we talk about far less frequently is our own journey. One of the reasons CloudZero can help other businesses grow, change, and adapt is because we know what it’s like to shift strategies and try new things that are a little bit scary or unknown.

The cloud holds such promise. It’s the promise of near-infinite scalability, power, and growth potential. Companies switching to the cloud, especially in the early days of the 2010s, were seduced by the possibilities of what could happen if they just spent a little more, raced against their competitors a little faster, or achieved just a bit more product functionality. Could they be the next Twitter? The next Uber? Or something even bigger and better than what had come before?