Companies migrate to the cloud to become more productive, respond to market changes, and be flexible — while spending less on cloud infrastructure. But there is one thing that many cloud-based organizations have learned: Cloud costs add up. Fast. As a result, 71% of cloud financial management teams doubt they will achieve expected results at the expected time or at all. Only 29% of cloud FinOps teams expect to achieve their cloud goals.

FinOps is one of the latest buzzwords in cloud computing. It’s a merger of two important departments — finance and operations — and describes “cloud financial operations,” (also called cloud financial management or cloud cost management).

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.

I am a big proponent of cross-functional alignment, as I remnded our ELT at a recent off-site meeting. There’s a lot of buzz about FinOps bringing financial accountability to cloud spend by eliminating procurement siloes and implementing cross-functional best practices. As the CFO of a SaaS company, I fully support this practice. In fact, Virtana recently made some changes to our cloud infrastructure as part of our own evolution.

Distributed tracing has been growing in popularity as a primary tool for investigating performance issues in microservices systems. Our recent DevOps Pulse survey shows a 38% increase year-over-year in organizations’ tracing use. Furthermore, 64% of those respondents who are not yet using tracing indicated plans to adopt it in the next two years. However, many organizations have yet to realize just how much potential distributed tracing holds.

Financial planning and analysis is becoming an increasingly strategic part of a SaaS organization. The role of finance is no longer about just taking inputs and calculating how they affect financial plans, but about driving business outcomes through effective financial planning. There is a popular Andreessen Horowitz article titled “Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager” that showcases best practices compared to worst practices.

Every couple years, it seems the tech industry mashes together different team names to make up the latest discipline — whether it’s DevOps, DevSecOps, AIOps, or most recently, NoOps. The names can seem eye roll-worthy at first. However, when their associated practices are followed correctly, many have been transformative. They force collaboration early and often — which helps companies improve velocity and foresee potential risk before disasters occur.