The efficiency, flexibility and strategic value of cloud computing are driving organizations to deploy cloud-based solutions at rapid pace. Fortune Business Insights predicts the global cloud computing market will experience annual growth of nearly 18% through 2028. As the cloud becomes one of the most expensive resources for modern organizations, cloud financial management, or FinOps, has become a critical initiative.

Setting FinOps KPIs helps keep your whole organization aligned toward the same financial goals. However, it takes more than simply setting a broad, company-wide financial goal and turning every employee loose to work on that goal without more specific directions. It’s far better to come up with realistic and achievable goals tailored toward each person or team that will be responsible for them. That’s because KPIs should ideally be focused around the typical persona of each team.

Public cloud can deliver significant business value across infrastructure cost savings, team productivity, service elasticity, and DevOps agility. Yet, up to 70% of organizations are regularly overshooting their cloud budgets, minimizing the gap between cloud costs and the revenue cloud investments can drive.

Cloud cost anomalies are unpredicted variations (typically increases) in cloud spending that are larger than expected based on historical patterns. Misconfiguration, unused resources, malicious activity or overambitious projects are some of the reasons for unexpected anomalies in cloud costs. Even the smallest of incidents can add up over time leading to cost overruns and bill shock.

Companies are investing heavily in the cloud for the operational and financial benefits. But without a robust cloud cost management strategy in place, the complexity of cloud services and billing can to overspending and unnecessary cloud waste. Being able to accurately predict future cloud spend is one way to more optimize cloud spend and inform budgets.

Cloud spend — which research shows makes up 51% of IT budgets — is a prime candidate for company cost savings initiatives with the potential to make a huge difference in gross margins. It’s also an area that has grown dramatically in the last few years due to digital transformation and a rise in cloud demand during the pandemic.