Latest news with #cloudcosts
Forbes
5 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Financial Discipline With AI: A Strategic Guide For Modern Enterprises
Jyoti Shah is a Director of Applications Development, a GenAI tech leader, mentor, innovation advocate, and Women In Tech advisor at ADP. Financial executives are confronted with a pressing issue as businesses quickly expand their cloud footprints: rising expenses with little visibility. Although cloud infrastructure promises agility and flexibility, it also comes with a degree of complexity that is challenging to handle without sophisticated tools. These days, a lot of organizations are left wondering: Where is our money going? More significantly, why are we spending it that way? Businesses are increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI), more especially Explainable AI (XAI), to provide transparency, accuracy and accountability to their cloud operations to confidently answer those questions. Why Cloud Costs Are So Difficult To Control Instance type, usage duration, storage tier and network traffic are dynamic factors affecting cloud service billing. A single enterprise bill may include thousands of line items from various teams, locations and projects. Conventional monitoring tools can display usage patterns, but they frequently fall short in providing an explanation for why particular expenses happened or how they might have been prevented. Inefficiencies, compartmental decision making and lost chances for cost containment result from this lack of understanding. What Is Explainable AI (XAI), And Why Does It Matter For Finance? AI has long been used to detect anomalies, forecast usage and optimize resources. However, many of these models are 'black boxes,' making it difficult for non-technical stakeholders to understand or trust the results. Explainable AI (XAI) bridges that gap. It offers human-readable insights into how AI models make decisions, allowing business and finance leaders to: • Justify optimization decisions. • Understand the cost of drivers. • Validate savings opportunities. • Improve cross-functional alignment. In essence, XAI brings AI-driven insights into the boardroom, turning cloud management into a financially disciplined, data-driven function. A Business Roadmap For Adopting AI In Cloud Cost Governance Here's how organizations can start using AI to drive financial accountability across their cloud environments: Begin by aligning AI implementation with business objectives such as: • Reducing unnecessary cloud spend • Improving budget forecasting accuracy • Allocating cloud costs to departments or projects • Enforcing spending policies without slowing innovation AI tools should be evaluated not just on their ability to optimize infrastructure, but on their capacity to explain and justify decisions in a way finance teams can understand. Many AI-powered platforms now offer explainable recommendations. For instance: • Rightsizing: 'This virtual machine is underutilized 90% of the time. Downscaling can save $420/month.' • Idle Resource Alerts: 'No API calls detected in the last 14 days. Deletion recommended.' • Forecast Variance: 'Increased compute from a training job led to a 25% deviation from your monthly budget.' With explanations like these, stakeholders can approve or reject actions with confidence—not guesswork. Real accountability happens when multiple teams can see, interpret and act on the same data. XAI-powered dashboards can provide: • Spend attribution by team, service and project • Breakdown of why certain cost anomalies occurred • Forecast adjustments based on explainable AI models These insights empower departments to take ownership of their usage and budgets, turning FinOps into a collaborative process rather than a post-mortem review. AI should not replace decision makers; it should empower them. Human-in-the-loop workflows allow finance and operations leaders to: • Validate AI recommendations before implementation. • Override actions based on business context (e.g., upcoming launches). • Fine-tune parameters based on organizational priorities. This balance ensures AI works with human judgment, not in isolation from it. To ensure AI adoption delivers more than just automation, organizations should define new successful metrics, such as: • Percentage of spend covered by explainable recommendations • Rate of approved vs. overridden AI suggestions • Trust or satisfaction ratings from finance stakeholders When explainability becomes a tracked KPI, teams are more likely to embrace AI tools as strategic enablers—not opaque systems to question or avoid. Business Value: Visibility, Trust And Efficiency When implemented well, AI can transform how organizations think about cloud resource management: • CFOs gain real-time insight into cost levels and future trends. • IT leaders align infrastructure decisions with business value. • Department heads receive budget accountability with clear explanations, not just chargebacks. Most importantly, XAI brings cost control into the open. Decisions are no longer reactive or based on gut feel—they're proactive, transparent and aligned to financial goals. Final Thoughts Even though XAI has a lot of potential, it also has a lot of problems. Investing in AI infrastructure, data preparation and connecting it to existing cloud platforms can be a lot of money up front, especially for companies that don't have well-developed FinOps or DevOps practices. Also, explainability can sometimes be incomplete or too technical, so it needs to be improved, and stakeholders need to be trained on a regular basis to make sure the insights are beneficial. Not all models are easy to make. Plating, working and adding interpretability to complicated systems can make explanations too simple or add extra work. Also, trust doesn't happen right away. Business and finance leaders may still be skeptical if early AI deployments make wrong suggestions, are not useful or are hard to understand. Issues with data quality, inconsistent tagging or old billing systems can make AI-generated insights even less clear and useful. To get past these problems, you need a dedicated change management plan that includes communication, education and ongoing feedback from end users along with the technical rollout. Only then can XAI go from being a promising tool to a highly trusted way to control cloud costs. Cloud spending cannot continue to be a technical mystery in a time when every dollar must be justified. By implementing AI, businesses can leverage cloud complexity to achieve operational agility, strategic alignment and financial discipline. In the cloud, financial accountability goes beyond cost reduction. The goal is to establish a culture in which each team recognizes the importance of what they're consuming. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
Associated Press
22-07-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
FinOpsly Launches Costix, The First Estimator Built for Multi-Cloud, AI, and Data Cost Planning
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 22, 2025-- FinOpsly, the AI-native control system for enterprise cloud, AI, and data costs, today announced the launch of Costix, an AI-powered estimation tool that turns cloud, data and AI initiatives into ready-to-build solution plans with clear cost estimates before anything gets deployed. Costix helps enterprise product, engineering, and pre-sales teams align early by generating a solution blueprint, detailed workload specifications, and a bill of materials with estimated costs to support accurate planning and stronger business cases from the start. A 2021 Flexera report found that over 30 percent of cloud spend is wasted due to poor planning and limited cost visibility. Despite this loss, most enterprises still rely on spreadsheets and assumptions to estimate costs for new features. These methods often require detailed workload inputs that aren't available early on. Native cloud calculators, though commonly used, are rigid and require granular configurations. They also lack support for multi-environment planning, making it hard to compare options, align teams, or prevent overruns before deployment. Moving cost planning upstream in the product lifecycle Costix helps teams move from rough planning and assumptions to concrete, architecture-aligned estimates before a single resource is provisioned. More accurate solution design Costix enables product teams to describe what they're building and receive a solution blueprint aligned to internal architecture standards. Costix also provides agentic AI assistance, giving users real-time guidance on things like configuration trade-offs as they scope projects. Validated specs, faster planning Costix comes pre-loaded with workload configurations and assumptions—covering compute, storage, and network—so engineers and architects can simply review and validate them across development, testing, and production environments. These inputs reflect actual architecture patterns and live cloud SKU data, enabling faster, more accurate planning while maintaining alignment with performance and compliance goals. A tailored bill of materials for internal alignment Costix produces a detailed, contract-aware bill of materials that includes pricing, tagging, and business mappings tailored to the user's organization. Product owners can use these estimates to justify investments, align with procurement and finance, and accelerate internal approvals. 'Cost control is no longer just a cloud problem. It is a systems problem across cloud, data, and AI,' said Kiran Jain, CEO and Co-Founder of FinOpsly. 'We built Costix to give teams a fast, reliable way to plan infrastructure costs upfront, using data they can trust - all in less than five minutes. Every estimate should lead to a decision. Every dollar spent should be traceable, defensible, and actionable. With Costix, we are making that standard possible.' A growing need for pre-deployment cost visibility As companies build AI applications, migrate data platforms, and scale cloud workloads, planning becomes harder and more critical. Costix helps teams align earlier, reducing risk and improving collaboration between product, sales, engineering, and finance. 'What sets Costix apart is its ability to turn business inputs into compliant solution designs — not just cost projections — giving teams a launch-ready blueprint from day one,' said Mueen Delvi, CTO and Co-Founder of FinOpsly. To learn more about Costix or request access, visit About FinOpsly FinOpsly is the AI-native control system for enterprise cloud, AI, and data costs. Its platform enables finance, engineering, and data teams to forecast, optimize, and govern infrastructure spend across AWS, Azure, Snowflake, and Databricks. From pre-deployment estimation to real-time enforcement, FinOpsly helps organizations reduce waste and improve cost accountability. For more information, visit View source version on CONTACT: Press Contact Gabriela Contreras Marketing Consultant [email protected] 415-797-8154 KEYWORD: UNITED STATES NORTH AMERICA CALIFORNIA INDUSTRY KEYWORD: SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE DATA MANAGEMENT SOURCE: FinOpsly Copyright Business Wire 2025. PUB: 07/22/2025 12:30 PM/DISC: 07/22/2025 12:31 PM
Forbes
22-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
The Hidden Cloud Cost Crisis: Three Steps To Take Control
Gilad David Maayan, CEO and Founder of Agile SEO. We work with brands like IBM, Intel and Imperva on enterprise SEO and content projects. Picture this: Your SaaS company is booming. New users are signing up daily. Then, the dreaded cloud bill arrives—doubled in just six months. Your finance team scratches their heads over invoices from Amazon Web Services (AWS) that might as well be hieroglyphics, while engineers happily push out more features, oblivious that they're funding a cloud provider's next corporate retreat. I find that cloud costs are increasingly emerging as a quiet threat to enterprise profitability. Without clear accountability, expenses can spiral out of control faster than office donuts disappear on Friday mornings. So, where's all that money going? And how can you avoid getting blindsided by it? Nearly a third of companies' cloud spend is pure waste. This problem is growing at 35% year-over-year, with some organizations seeing costs surge by an eye-watering 500%. It's no wonder 42% of CIOs consider cloud waste their number one challenge. A staggering 70% of companies lack visibility into their cloud spending, with only 30% knowing where their budget actually goes—like handing someone your credit card and saying, "Surprise me!" The causes are varied: forgotten test servers humming away without anyone noticing, over-provisioned systems and backup requirements seemingly designed by someone with severe trust issues. Maintaining unused cloud instances is about as practical as that treadmill-turned-coat-rack silently judging you from the corner of your bedroom. Let's look at three problems you may not be aware of, which can be a serious threat to your company's IT budget. Developers often request more resources than needed, wanting to ensure optimal performance during peak periods. But they forget to scale down afterward or accidentally leave test environments running 24/7 because there's no automated system to shut them off on weekends. The solution? Automation and accountability: • Implement automatic shutdowns during off-hours. • Tag resources for easy identification of temporary instances. • Generate clear reports showing cost savings over time. To illustrate the potential savings, I was involved in a project carried out by a cloud backup and disaster recovery vendor, where one company saved $100,000 annually just by stopping large elastic compute cloud (EC2) instances at nights and weekends. They also eliminated unnecessary snapshots and properly tagged resources to identify what could be terminated. Cloud cost management is complex. Other sources go more deeply into how to optimize cloud resources when it comes to cost management on AWS and Azure. Storage costs represent nearly half of all cloud billing expenses, yet I find that many teams don't understand the cost structure. Cloud providers have pricing models that can seem more complex than quantum physics, with unpredictable costs and tiering systems based on virtual machine (VM) size. The fine print often reveals you're paying for full backups rather than just incremental changes. These complexities make forecasting nearly impossible, with management discovering too late that storage costs have blown past budgets. To avoid surprises, it's crucial for teams to understand how their data is stored and managed. Here are some key questions they should be asking: • Do they know how their tool is storing full or incremental backups for the long term? Full or incremental? • Are they utilizing efficient cold storage tiers for long-term data? If so, are they optimizing their storage tiers? Do they know how long it would take to recover their systems? As cyber threats escalate, I also find that organizations tend to overspend on protection. Security teams create multiple copies of large production systems hoping this ensures continuity. If downtime occurs, cloud providers charge substantial data access fees without guaranteeing quick recovery. Teams need to understand they can maintain optimal recovery points with frequent backups without breaking the bank. Native cloud providers often charge for full backups when incremental backups would often suffice. Relying on a single cloud vendor can lead to lock-in, restricted flexibility and higher costs. Because of this, companies worldwide are shifting their cloud strategies. While deeply reliant on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, I'm seeing increasing multi-cloud implementations and even returns to hybrid approaches. Ask yourself these two questions: • Is your IT team looking into the logistics of having a multi-cloud environment? • Have they explored tools that allow them to seamlessly replicate and store data to an off-site, affordable storage repository and recover quickly from another cloud? Your cloud bill doesn't have to be a horror story. With proper visibility, automation and strategic planning, it can become just another predictable business expense—leaving the surprises for your product launches, not your financial statements. Forbes Business Council is the foremost growth and networking organization for business owners and leaders. Do I qualify?
