Cloud Efficiency Posture Management (CEPM) is the discipline of measuring and improving the efficiency of your cloud footprint. CEPM tools continuously monitor your infrastructure for inefficiencies, provide context, and streamline remediation, giving teams confidence that their cloud is efficient, optimized, and well-managed.

With growing reliance on cloud infrastructure, teams must be proactive about managing cloud efficiency. CEPM goes beyond controlling costs and enables agility and innovation.

Today’s organizations face growing challenges in managing cloud resources efficiently. The rapid expansion of cloud services, increasingly complex multi-cloud environments, and escalating costs make it harder for organizations to optimize usage and maintain efficiency.

Common challenges include:

• Limited Visibility: A lack of clear visibility into resource efficiency leads to unnecessary costs, missed optimization opportunities, lowered performance, and reduced ability to scale. 
• Complex Multi-cloud Environments: Juggling multiple cloud providers—each with distinct usage models and pricing structures—makes managing cloud efficiency increasingly complex. This fragmentation makes it difficult to optimize spend or align cloud usage with business goals. 
• Reactive Efficiency Practices: Many organizations treat the symptoms, rather than the root causes, of cloud inefficiency. The challenge here lies with existing tools, which focus solely on cost metrics and miss the complex usage patterns that can drive inefficiencies.
• FinOps and Engineering Misalignment: Finance teams seek cost control, while engineering teams prioritize performance and speed, creating friction, inefficiency, and missed collaboration opportunities. Without a shared view of goals and data, both teams end up working at cross purposes, slowing down decision-making and undermining optimization efforts.

How CEPM Works

CEPM enables deep detection of waste and inefficiencies through root cause analysis and addresses inefficiencies quickly and permanently. It supports an end-to-end process from initial analysis through reporting on realized efficiency gains.

1. Define Cloud Efficiency Standards

Create a benchmark for cloud efficiency.  Establishing clear standards aligned with your business goals is the first step toward meaningful, measurable efficiency improvements.

2. Continuously Monitor and Measure

Integrate a CEPM platform into your cloud environment to enable data collection and observation. Analyze cost, usage metrics, networking, performance metrics, resource metadata, and more. This powers comprehensive analyses, exposes hidden waste, and drives action.

3. Identify Inefficiencies

Leverage comprehensive analysis to pinpoint inefficiencies hidden deep within “normal” usage patterns. These inefficiencies often go unnoticed because routine operations mask waste that is only uncovered with context and behavioral analytics. 

These can include:

• Inefficient data transfer between regions or availability zones
• Oversized or misconfigured storage in database services
• Idle workloads running due to misconfigured autoscaling policies
• Excessive snapshots from unmanaged backup retention

4. Prioritize and Contextualize Findings

Reduce alert fatigue and zero in on high-impact, low-risk opportunities. CEPM cuts through noise by analyzing your cloud footprint holistically, surfacing insights often missed by legacy tools. It then delivers prioritized, contextualized recommendations to your engineering team. The result: faster decisions, smarter resource allocation, and lasting operational gains.

5. Embed Actionable Steps into Engineering Workflows

Directly integrate remediation steps and recommendations into existing engineering tools (e.g., Jira, ServiceNow), streamlining the remediation process and increasing engineering accountability. CEPM generates detailed tickets with full context, clear remediation steps, and automated resolution, enabling true cloud efficiency.

6. Automate and Streamline Remediation

CEPM doesn't just identify inefficiencies. It ensures fast resolution. Automatically embed clear, actionable remediation steps directly into your engineering team's tools (such as Jira, ServiceNow, Slack, and Teams). This integration drives immediate action, tracks remediation progress, and verifies realized savings. By automating workflows and continuous benchmarking, CEPM empowers teams to eliminate inefficiencies, improve accountability, and demonstrate clear ROI, ensuring long-term cloud efficiency.

Benefits of CEPM

CEPM facilitates collaboration between engineering teams and FinOps stakeholders. Together, they drive efficiency gains through holistic visibility, proactive optimization, and built-in remediation.

Organizations can realize these benefits with a well-executed CEPM practice:

• Proactive Cost Savings: Reduce cloud spend by 20–30% or more by continuously identifying and eliminating waste.
• Continuous Optimization:   Gain ongoing insight into efficiency opportunities by replacing ad-hoc cost reviews with uninterrupted data collection and analysis, .
• Improved Cross-team Collaboration: Foster collaboration between FinOps and engineering teams through shared goals built on visibility into usage, speed and performance‍
• Greater Strategic Agility: Redirect cloud waste into innovation and core business priorities.
  

Who Should Use CEPM?

CEPM is essential for anyone involved in managing cloud resources:

• FinOps Practitioners and Cloud Cost Managers: Achieve greater clarity and control over cloud expenditures.
  
• Cloud Architects and DevOps Engineers: Continuously optimize technical efficiency without sacrificing performance or agility.‍
• IT Finance Leaders, CTOs, and CIOs: Gain strategic visibility into cloud efficiency, reduce financial risk, and improve ROI.
  

CEPM vs. Traditional Cloud Cost Management

Traditional cost management focuses narrowly on financial visibility and periodic cost-cutting. It often relies on manual reviews, static reports, and delayed insights, uncovering only low-hanging fruit while missing deeper, more nuanced efficiency opportunities. 

In contrast, CEPM offers: 

• Continuous, Proactive Management: Replace reactive, point-in-time reviews with ongoing action embedded in daily operations.
• Deeper Technical Insights: Go beyond surface-level spend data with holistic analysis across usage patterns, configurations, performance, and cloud dependencies. ‍
• Engineering Workflow Integration: Drive immediate adoption through actionable remediation recommendations incorporated directly into existing developer and operational tools.