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đź“Š Hyperscalers back FinOps to curb runaway cloud and SaaS costs
FinOps Standard Expands to SaaS, Downtime Costs Soar, Pragmatic Cloud Choice Insights from Alex Podobnik
Aimply Team & Zack Tembi
September 29, 2025
FinOps Standard Expands to SaaS, Downtime Costs Soar, Pragmatic Cloud Choice Insights from Alex Podobnik
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Welcome to this week’s edition of CIOsurge!
This week:
Hyperscalers back FOCUS 1.2, standardizing cloud/SaaS cost data and making FinOps a core competency for CIOs.
Median outage costs hit ~$33k/min; observability-first ops with SLOs, auto-rollback, and unified telemetry are now table stakes.
From my chat with Alex Podobnik: choose cloud by context—agreements, team skills, and workload fit—and negotiate everything else.
Let’s make this week a game-changer.
Stay sharp. Stay ahead.
đź’ˇ Guest Expert Insights: Alex Podobnik
🧠Picking a Cloud Like an Adult
From my conversation with Alex Podobnik, one theme stood out: context beats dogma. If you’ve got enterprise agreements or deep Active Directory ties, Azure is often the pragmatic move. If your workloads are data-heavy and the team already lives in GCP, lean into that. Don’t ignore credits and long-term commits—they change the math.
Team familiarity is a hard constraint. A crew that knows one cloud cold will usually outperform a “best on paper” option. Weigh training time and the local hiring market before you chase features you can’t realistically support.
Start from the application requirements, then negotiate everything else. The right answer is the platform your org can run well for years—not the logo that wins a slide.
đź“Š Hyperscalers back FinOps to curb runaway cloud and SaaS costs
At the FinOps X conference, AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud, and Oracle threw their support behind FOCUS 1.2, an open billing and usage standard from the FinOps Foundation. The framework now covers SaaS and PaaS costs, with hyperscalers adding new AI-driven cost optimization tools. Membership has also expanded to include AMD, Nvidia, and American Express, signaling broader adoption of standardized cost governance.
FinOps is moving from a niche discipline to a core IT competency. With hyperscalers now backing FOCUS, CIOs finally have a common standard to unify reporting across cloud and SaaS. That’s critical for cutting through complexity, especially as AI-driven consumption accelerates costs in unpredictable ways.
The opportunity for CIOs is to use this momentum to bridge FinOps with asset management. This means better visibility into contracts, renewals, and SaaS sprawl. If you haven’t yet formalized FinOps practices, the hyperscalers are making it clear: it’s no longer optional. It’s becoming the new language of cloud cost governance.
- Zack Tembi
🛑 Downtime’s $76M bill forces observability-first ops
New Relic reports median outage costs of $33,333 per minute (~$2M/hour) and $76M annually. Engineers spend 33% on disruptions; 41% of issues surface via manual checks or complaints. Top causes: network failure, third-party/cloud incidents, and bad deploys. Rising AI/agent use adds blind spots, intensifying the need for end-to-end visibility and faster root-cause isolation.
If outages are consuming a third of engineering time, your roadmap is funding firefighting. Prioritize SLOs, error budgets, and automated rollback, and make every deploy observable by default. Tie MTTR and change-failure rate to team KPIs so reliability and speed move together.
Harden third-party risk and AI agent rollout: require chaos tests, dependency SBOMs, and runbooks that cross infra, app, and vendor layers. Budget now for unified telemetry, topology mapping, and AIOps, cheaper than the next hour of downtime.
- Zack Tembi
🗞️ At A Glance
đź’ˇ CIO Spotlights
CyberArk appoints Ariel Pisetzky CIO as Omer Grossman shifts to trust role
Ariel Pisetzky joins CyberArk as CIO after leading IT and cybersecurity strategy at Taboola, bringing 20+ years of experience in enterprise IT.
He succeeds Omer Grossman, who becomes Chief Trust Officer and head of the new CYBR Unit focused on advisory, incident response, and identity security strategy.
Pisetzky will oversee IT engineering, operations, data, AI, and security to scale CyberArk’s global growth.
Willis Re appoints Sankha Ghosh as EVP and Group CIO
Sankha Ghosh, former CIO at AssuredPartners, joins Willis Re as EVP and Group CIO with 27+ years of tech leadership experience.
Ghosh has led large-scale digital transformations at GE, Synchrony, and Dollar Financial, bringing expertise in cloud, analytics, and data management.
He will spearhead Willis Re’s push toward an analytics-driven, innovation-focused reinsurance platform.