In the world of plastic money, all it takes these days is a valid credit card to spin up a virtual machine in the cloud. But as engineers move quickly to deliver more features and power the latest applications, the cost of spinning up can rapidly spin out of control.

It’s a familiar problem for Cloudability Inc., a company that has built a business around cloud cost management and helping businesses gain a better handle on expenses in the virtualized world.

“Engineers have an unlimited credit card that they can go spend on as quickly as they need, and they never see the statements; they never see the bills,” said J.R. Storment (pictured), co-founder and general manager of EMEA at Cloudability. “On the other side you’ve got finance teams or procurement teams who have lost control over the power of the purchase order, and they have to actually rein that in. They’re struggling to understand what the spend is.”

Storment spoke with Peter Burris (@plburris), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. They discussed recent growth of the financial operations movement and the importance of mapping the cost of cloud services to business results.

Maintaining accountability

Renewed efforts to achieve better visibility and control over cloud costs have given rise to FinOps, a financial operations model designed to maintain accountability across the variable spend of cloud-related services. A new non-profit FinOps Foundation has been formed, with Cloudability, Atlassian and Autodesk among the founding members, to help companies better understand the allocation of cloud spending across the enterprise.

“On the engineering side it’s seeing cost become a first-class citizen of an efficiency metric that they need to look at,” Storment explained. “We need to start tracking the spending, mapping that to the business, and then tying that to the value delivered.”

Chief financial officers at many companies are beginning to look at cloud spending and finding that, while it is not yet the largest line item, it’s the fastest-growing cost-of-goods-sold expense, according to Storment. This is providing a growing need to map the cost of information coming from the cloud with actual business capabilities.

“Cloudability is focused on improving the unit economics around cloud spend,” Storment said. “We take their billing data, their utilization data, and various metadata about their business and do machine learning and data science on top of it to help them get better visibility into where that spend is going and how they’re using it.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations.

Photo: SiliconANGLE