Cloud adoption continues to grow, and with it, the financial complexity of managing distributed infrastructure at scale. Gartner forecasts that worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services will reach $723.4 billion in 2025, up from $595.7 billion in 2024. As environments expand across multiple providers and services, many organizations are seeking greater clarity into how cloud resources are used and how those patterns influence overall spend.
Modern cloud environments often span numerous accounts, services, and dynamically scaling resources. As engineering teams automate more of their infrastructure delivery, finance and operations teams may look for additional ways to understand how different workloads contribute to overall costs.
Cloud cost management software is designed to help address this need. These platforms go beyond basic spend tracking by providing visibility, budgeting tools, forecasting capabilities, and reporting that support both engineering and financial decision-making. While some tools focus primarily on identifying underutilized resources, others integrate broader cost, usage, and operational data to support more comprehensive cost management practices.
This article outlines factors that influence cloud cost visibility, describes different approaches taken by cloud management platforms, and highlights emerging capabilities that organizations are adopting to support both financial and engineering workflows.
Watch 12-minute demo
Watch the demo to learn how Wiz Cloud finds toxic combinations across misconfigurations, identities, data exposure, and vulnerabilities—without agents.
Core capabilities to look for in cloud cost management software
Organizations evaluating cloud cost management software often look for capabilities that provide clear visibility into spending patterns and support both engineering and financial decision-making. The following areas are commonly considered when assessing available platforms.
Multi-cloud visibility
Many organizations prioritize tools that can consolidate cost and usage data from environments such as AWS, Azure, GCP, and SaaS services into a unified view. These platforms typically use native APIs to collect billing and usage information and then normalize different billing formats, usage metrics, pricing models, and discount structures. This helps teams compare costs across providers in a consistent framework – for example, aligning compute resources from multiple clouds into comparable categories.
Cost allocation, chargeback, and showback
Cost allocation capabilities help teams understand how spending maps to projects, teams, and environments. Allocation can be performed through resource tags, cloud account hierarchies (such as AWS Organizations or Azure management groups), or a combination of methods.
Some platforms offer techniques to help interpret costs even when tags are incomplete or inconsistent, supporting scenarios where teams want to maintain financial transparency while operating in fast-moving cloud environments.
These capabilities can also help organizations attribute costs to specific initiatives, enabling clearer visibility into resource usage across development, staging, and production environments.
Budgeting and forecasting
Budgeting and forecasting features often incorporate machine learning or statistical models to distinguish between fixed costs (such as reservations), variable costs from dynamic scaling, and predictable seasonal patterns. These capabilities can help teams anticipate expected spend and receive notifications when budgets or thresholds approach predefined limits.
Early visibility into cost trends enables finance and engineering teams to understand which services or workloads are driving changes, supporting collaborative planning and decision-making.
Reporting and dashboards
Cloud cost platforms commonly offer role-based dashboards to support the different needs of finance, operations, and engineering teams. Finance teams may focus on trends, allocations, and budget variance, while engineering teams may look more closely at utilization and optimization opportunities.
Integrations with business intelligence tools can help organizations perform deeper analysis by retaining data relationships, reducing manual data preparation, and enabling exports to financial systems for audit and reconciliation workflows.
Tagging and governance enforcement
Governance capabilities help ensure resources include required metadata from the moment they are created. Policy-based controls can integrate with cloud provider APIs to support consistent tagging practices or prevent the deployment of resources that do not meet defined criteria.
Some platforms offer a combination of mandatory and optional tags to balance operational governance with flexibility for teams, helping maintain visibility across environments while supporting efficient development workflows.
The Cloud Security Model Cheat Sheet
Cloud development requires a new security workflow to address the unique challenges of the cloud and to effectively protect cloud environments. Explore Wiz’s 4-step cheat sheet for a practical guide to transforming security teams, processes, and tools to support cloud development.
Key features organizations often consider in cloud cost management platforms
Organizations managing dynamic and complex cloud environments often evaluate platforms based on several commonly referenced capability areas. The features below represent functionality that some cost management platforms provide to support financial visibility and operational decision-making.
Near real-time data ingestion: Some platforms offer sub-hourly or near real-time cost and usage updates. This can help teams identify unexpected spending patterns more quickly than once-daily billing refresh cycles. Near real-time visibility may be particularly useful for workloads that scale dynamically, such as auto-scaling applications or resource-intensive training jobs.
Anomaly detection: Many tools use machine learning or statistical baselining to help distinguish between typical variations in resource usage and spending patterns that warrant further attention. These models often adapt over time based on historical behavior, allowing teams to focus on the most relevant deviations without managing numerous manual thresholds.
Policy-based enforcement: Certain platforms integrate with cloud provider APIs to support policy enforcement during provisioning. These capabilities can help ensure resources meet defined governance requirements – such as tagging rules, instance types, or configuration standards – before they are deployed.
Ownership mapping: Some platforms offer automated methods for associating cloud resources with responsible teams or functions. This is typically done through a combination of resource metadata, hierarchical account structures, and other contextual signals. Clear ownership helps organizations align relevant teams with cost, usage, and optimization responsibilities.
DevOps workflow integration: Integration with CI/CD pipelines, ITSM tools, and development platforms can help surface cost information earlier in the development process. This may include cost implications during code reviews, alerts triggered during deployment processes, or visibility within tools engineers already use.
Intuitive user experience and broad integrations: Platforms often differentiate themselves through ease of use and breadth of integrations. Interfaces designed to support a range of users – for example, finance, engineering, and operations teams – can help reduce onboarding time. Integrations with observability and workflow tools such as Datadog, New Relic, Jira, and ServiceNow can further streamline analysis and reporting.
Cost insights combined with operational or security context: Some organizations look for platforms that combine cost data with additional context such as configuration, performance, or security information. This can support more informed optimization decisions by ensuring recommendations align with operational requirements, compliance needs, and application performance goals.
Comparing types of cloud cost management software platforms
Finance/FinOps-oriented platforms
Platforms such as IBM Cloudability, VMware Tanzu CloudHealth, and Zesty are often used by organizations with established financial governance processes. These tools typically align with technology business management (TBM) and FinOps reporting models, offering features such as chargeback, showback, allocation workflows, and budgeting capabilities.
Some platforms provide integrations that allow finance teams to combine cloud invoices with broader financial data, conduct scenario analysis, or model cost variations across business units. Examples include CloudHealth’s reporting capabilities and Zesty’s automated approaches to adjusting specific resource types such as block storage.
These platforms are frequently selected by organizations seeking detailed financial controls, alignment with general-ledger structures, or comprehensive budget management. Depending on the environment, engineering teams may adopt them to varying degrees based on how closely the workflows align with their operational practices.
Engineering-led platforms
Some organizations prioritize platforms that integrate directly into engineering and deployment workflows. Examples include nOps, Spot.io, and—in Wiz’s case—an approach that combines cost visibility with operational and contextual cloud data.
Engineering-led platforms often focus on surfacing cost information earlier in the development lifecycle and integrating with CI/CD systems, infrastructure automation, or operational tooling. For example, nOps includes features designed to associate cloud spend with business context, while Spot.io provides automated workload optimization based on spot instance selection and scaling patterns.
Wiz believes that combining cost insights with broader operational and security context can help teams understand how architectural decisions relate to both financial and cloud environment considerations.
These platforms may be particularly useful for teams looking for cost visibility that aligns closely with development processes and daily engineering workflows.
Native cloud provider offerings
Native tools such as AWS Cost Explorer, Microsoft Cost Management, and Google Cloud Billing are commonly used by organizations leveraging their respective cloud platforms. These tools typically offer detailed visibility into usage and costs for their own ecosystems, along with integrations into related services such as budget alerts or forecasting features.
Teams often use these tools to access cost data quickly without additional procurement steps. Native tools can offer deep alignment with platform-specific services, pricing models, and account structures.
Organizations with multi-cloud environments may combine native tools with additional platforms to create consolidated views across providers or to incorporate more granular forecasting, allocation, or operational context from external sources.
Bringing cost visibility into everyday cloud decision-making
As organizations expand their use of cloud services, many teams aim to make cost visibility as integrated into daily workflows as performance and operational monitoring. When cost information is accessible and contextual, engineering and financial stakeholders can make decisions that reflect both technical requirements and budget considerations.
Wiz’s point of view is that combining cost insights with operational, configuration, and security context can help organizations understand how financial patterns relate to broader cloud environments. Within the Wiz platform, cost data is presented alongside visibility into posture, compliance, and performance, allowing teams to view optimization opportunities through multiple dimensions.
For organizations seeking to align cost management with existing engineering and cloud workflows, contextual cost insights can support decision-making without requiring separate processes or tools. This approach aims to help teams incorporate financial considerations into their broader cloud strategy in a way that complements existing operational practices.
Schedule a demo to explore how Wiz approaches cost, security, and operational visibility in cloud environments.
Manage Cloud Costs with Wiz
Learn how Wiz combines security insights with cost visibility to maximize business outcomes.
