Flexera this week revealed it has acquired ProsperOps, a provider of a platform for tracking and analyzing cloud computing costs, and Chaos Genius, a platform that enables organizations to reduce the total cost of employing data lake services provided by Snowflake and Databricks.

Designed for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud services, ProsperOps provides an automation framework for implementing best FinOps practices to optimize consumption of services.

Chaos Genius, meanwhile, has developed a set of AI agents that autonomously optimize inefficient usage of data lakes services to reduce costs.

Flexera CEO Jim Ryan said the two acquisitions extend an existing portfolio of IT asset management and cost control tools and platforms further into the realm of the cloud.

While more IT, especially in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), is being consumed as a service, most organizations are not centrally managing budget allocations. In some instances, an IT leader may have responsibility for tracking billing, while in other cases a business unit leader is funding a project. At the same time, finance teams that have little insight into how cloud services are being consumed are struggling to predict costs.

Significant progress has been made in terms of defining best FinOps practices but many are still working through how to expose cost metrics to the engineering teams that are actually provisioning IT resources, noted Ryan.

That issue will only become more problematic as the cost of the infrastructure resources being consumed only increases as more AI applications and agents are deployed, he added.

In fact, as consumption of IT technologies as a service continues to increase, many organizations are discovering to their chagrin that the cost of goods for the digital services they are providing is spiraling out of control, said Ryan. Unfortunately, cloud computing has become a true utility that organizations can easily scale up and down as needed so for the moment each cloud service is a platform that is effectively managed in isolation, he added.

As a result, IT teams are not able to effectively play one provider against another to effectively manage costs beyond simply negotiating lower rates via a volume discount that is usually based on an annual commitment, noted Ryan. In effect, that volume contract only serves to further lock an organization into a specific cloud service provider, he added.

It’s not clear how soon that issue will come to a head within organizations, but at this juncture it’s more a question of when rather than if. IT organizations that don’t put the controls required to manage costs today are not going to be able to effectively enforce any policy that might be adopted tomorrow.

Hopefully, with the rise of AI it will become simpler to gain more visibility into how cloud services are being consumed. In the meantime, however, in the absence of the right tools the total cost of IT is only likely to increase to a point where many organizations are going to be much less comfortable absorbing than they have historically been willing to accept.