For many companies, cloud costs are among the top investments these days. With a growing number of services, instances and regions, cloud cost optimization is becoming increasingly painful. Companies use cloud management platforms to optimize costs and increase cloud visibility and security. But staying on top of AWS budgets requires proficiency, agility and time—especially when any glitch can result in massive cost bleeds.

Cloud for analytics may be the biggest bait and switch in recent history. Until now. Not long ago, cloud was billed as the promised land – a mystical paradise of flexibility, scalability, performance and, best of all, lower costs than we ever thought possible.

How Cloud Computing is evolving alongside Big Data, Analytics, and AI in Financial Services. New technology like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cloud Computing, big data, and prescriptive analytics are changing the way the Financial Services sector does business. With evolving tech comes both new opportunities as well as different risks, and companies within the space must innovate and embrace new ideas as shifting business conditions and changing consumer preferences dictate new norms.

“You cannot be the same, think the same and act the same if you hope to be successful in a world that does not remain the same.” This sentence by John C. Maxwell is so relevant to rapidly changing cloud hosting technology. Businesses understand the added value and are looking at cloud technologies to handle both operational and analytical workloads.

I ordered a ride share recently from a beach; the app struggled to find a car, so I had to make several requests. After the fourth or fifth attempt, my bank alerted me to possible fraudulent activity on my credit card via SMS. Each time I ordered a ride, the service put a pending charge on my card. After I texted back that it was just me, the bank reactivated my account. Though the process was annoying, I felt reassured my bank could detect possible fraudulence that quickly.

Aside from ensuring each service is working properly, one of the most challenging parts of managing a cloud-based infrastructure is cost monitoring. There are countless services to keep track of—including storage, databases, and computation—each with their own complex pricing structure. Monitoring cloud costs is quite different from other organizational costs in that it can be difficult to detect anomalies in real-time and accurately forecast monthly costs.