Few areas of business have faced more pressure over the last three years than finance and supply chain teams. Yet most are stuck managing this upheaval with manual activities and processes that haven’t changed much since the last enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation. The systems and tools these departments traditionally rely on lack the agility needed to excel in today’s business reality. That’s why we’re introducing ServiceNow Finance and Supply Chain Workflows.

One of the biggest issues related to large-scale cloud deployments is overspending. It’s no surprise that as organizations scale their cloud-native Kubernetes environments, the associated costs rise along with that growth. However, there is a disconnect between the rising expenses and how well businesses can accurately and effectively monitor and control costs in the cloud, across multiple clouds and in hybrid cloud environments.

Every time your company onboards a new client or releases a new product, your cloud bill will grow. In fact, it doesn’t take a large event at all to see a spike. Whenever your company changes direction even slightly, it can affect the bottom line. Add to that factors such as economic inflation and increased demand for high-speed, high-power cloud services, and it may seem like each month’s cloud bill is higher than it was before. If that’s the case for you, you’re not alone.

Cloud FinOps is rapidly becoming popular among organizations in today’s digital age due to its ability to help manage financial operations more efficiently. This is because it allows organizations to track, measure, and optimize their cloud spend with greater visibility. It also helps improve operational efficiency by automating numerous financial processes, including billing, budgeting, auditing, and reporting.

Effective troubleshooting and resolution of critical production issues require DevOps and R&D teams to utilize logging and observability. However, selecting the right logging solution can be challenging, given the wide range of available options and associated costs. Additionally, the strategy for logging usage should be tailored to the needs of different personas and use cases, such as DevOps engineers versus developers.

With the current financial climate, cost reduction is top of mind for everyone. IT is one of the biggest cost centers in organizations, and understanding what drives those costs is critical. Many simply don’t understand the cost of their Kubernetes workloads, or even have observability into basic units of cost. This is where FinOps comes into play, and organizations are beginning to implement those best practice standards to understand their cost.

FinOps, or the practice of managing a company’s cloud computing costs, and DevOps, the process of efficiently building applications in the cloud, should ideally go hand-in-hand. Engineers with a streamlined development process and a cost-conscious mindset can produce functional products with great margins and a high potential for scalability. However, incorporating FinOps into the DevOps lifecycle, and vice versa, isn’t always easy.

In the early days of SaaS companies, most engineering and cloud operations teams weren’t tasked with monitoring or optimizing cloud costs. In fact, it would have been unlikely for these teams to care about cloud cost optimization at all, let alone take measures to fix issues and look for opportunities. Today, SaaS companies that want to secure a competitive foothold and ensure long-term success have to care about cloud costs.

Teams and organizations are leveraging Kubernetes to build platforms supporting their digital transformational efforts. A Kubernetes-based platform provides cloud-native architecture benefits such as automation, elasticity, resilience, and abstraction of the underlying infrastructure.