The State Of Cloud Cost Intelligence

In its ideal form, cloud cost intelligence gives companies visibility into every penny of their cloud spend — the costs of specific products, features, and teams; the causes of sudden cost spikes; the tools to assess spend through a lens of business context.

Cloud cost intelligence turns cloud spend from a liability into an asset, from a blind spot into the fuel for better business outcomes. With responses from a roughly 50/50 split between finance and engineering professionals, we wanted to know how close they were to this ideal state.

Here’s what we found.

And The Bigger A Company Gets, The Worse Their Visibility Becomes

When we segmented answers by company size, there was an obvious pattern.

When Segmented By Company Stage, Public Companies Fared Worse Than Venture-Backed Or Private Equity Owned Companies

Engineering Cares About Cloud Cost

After analyzing the companies who have the most control and and visibility when it comes to cloud spend, one variable stood out: an engineering culture that takes ownership of cloud spend.

We first asked respondents to select whether they believe their engineering team has a culture of cost ownership. The majority of respondents said they either have a strong culture or somewhat strong culture of cost ownership.

Engineering Ownership Positively Correlates With Better Understanding Of Cloud Cost

Next, to help us measure the impact of a culture of cost ownership, we compared each group’s answers to other questions.

A pattern emerged: Companies who said they had strong cultures of engineering autonomy were most likely to be spending efficiently in the cloud and the most likely to know the exact costs of different business metrics. Moreover, they correlated positively with several other business metrics: less variance and faster detection when they were trending over budget.

Engineering Ownership Drives Better Outcomes For Finance

We asked finance professionals on a scale from 1-10, how confident they felt in the accuracy of their cloud cost reporting, as well as how confident they would feel if a major business decision was made on their cloud cost data.

We also asked engineering to rate the difficulty of providing cloud cost data and context to finance. Engineering ownership of cloud cost correlated positively with both confidence in reporting, as well as ability to provide data to finance.

Similarly, we asked finance professionals how often they believed their engineering teams consider cloud cost. Only 39% said they consider it all the time.

However, at companies where engineers considered it frequently, finance had higher satisfaction and confidence in reporting.

High Performing DevOps Teams Are Considering Cloud Cost

Using the same criteria as the annual State of DevOps report, we asked engineers to select where their organization stood on the DevOps maturity curve, including elite, high, medium, and low. We showed them this chart.

We found that high and elite companies were considering cost more frequently and earlier in the software development lifecycle than medium and low performers — a good signal that cost is becoming part of the fabric of DevOps.

But There’s Still A Long Way To Go

FinOps is an emerging practice that was conceived only a handful of years ago. We expect that in the future, more companies will increase their focus on strategic aspects of managing cloud spend, such as unit economics.

Through solutions like CloudZero, companies can have the best of both worlds. CloudZero’s mission is to make cost-conscious innovation a reality for all digital-native businesses. CloudZero is the only solution that allows companies to allocate 100% of their spend in just hours, aligning everyone around the cost dimensions that matter most.

Adopting cloud cost intelligence is step one. Finding the tools to support it is step two. By providing allocation without tagging, CloudZero boosts engineering autonomy, providing the most valuable resource for companies looking to make the most of their cloud cost data.