As data continues to take center stage, companies are increasingly relying on cloud solutions to tackle their vast volumes and variety of data to drive business needs. Countless key initiatives involving digital transformation, analytics and AI are capturing their attention. These data-driven efforts rely heavily on comprehensive and cloud-native data management to unlock value and ensure success. Data management is now the backbone of successful data projects, helping companies gear up for their strategic business imperatives.

However, with the growth in cloud-native data management solutions such as the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) comes the need to manage and optimize cloud costs. 62% of organizations exceeded their budgeted cloud storage spending in 2024, an increase from 53% in 2023.¹  As businesses strive to balance innovation with fiscal responsibility, the concept of FinOps observability — the practice of using observability tools and techniques to gain deep insights into cloud resource utilization — stands out as a model of efficiency. According to Harness in its FinOps in Focus2025 report, organizations that implement FinOps best practices realize 27- 40% cost savings compared to on-premises environments,²  unlocking significant opportunities for innovation. FinOps observability is a vital component in the toolkit of today's forward-thinking enterprises. Now more than ever, IT leaders need to optimize their cloud data management cost so that they can reallocate investments towards strategic initiatives, optimize resource use, reduce waste and redirect savings towards innovation.

IDMC uses a consumption-based pricing model built around the Informatica Processing Unit (IPU). IDMC’s IPU management feature ensures sophisticated orchestration of data-handling capabilities are managed with financial prudence.

In this blog, we detail how IPU management enables FinOps observability that can optimize expenditures and channel IPU usage to drive greater innovations for you.

Businesses investing in data management and expanding their use case implementations want to gain clear visibility into resource usage and spending. This helps them manage costs, make informed decisions about consumption and identify areas for optimization to maximize ROI, reduce waste and pursue value-driven use case expansion to help with strategic goals.

IDMC’s holistic IPU management feature helps to optimally address these needs through:

• Proactive notification about consumption
• User-defined tags and project/folder-level details for multi-dimensional consumption analysis
• Departmental chargeback capabilities
• Exporting consumption data to cloud data stores and integrating with the right FinOps tools for usage analytics

Let’s explore these capabilities in more detail to understand how they help gain control over IPU consumption to maximize your cloud data management ROI.
 

Monitoring cloud-based service consumption is vital to staying on budget. You want to ensure you are not overspending or utilizing resources beyond your plan. In IDMC, you can set up IPU consumption alerts to proactively manage usage. These alerts, based on user-defined thresholds or standard thresholds, notify administrators within IDMC and in emails as illustrated in Figure 1. Alerts are also available via API that you can integrate with the FinOps tools of your choice. This helps ensure easy oversight and management of your company’s IPU consumption.

Figure 1: Consumption alert setup screen and an email alert notification

Having the ability to view data management resource utilization is great, but it falls short if you cannot see granular details. Often, the details are hidden in fine print and companies want to analyze their data management resource consumption using different views. They need business-centric visibility and control over the consumption of data management assets to meet chargeback requirements with greater cost transparency.

To address chargeback programs with insightful and organized IPU consumption, IDMC allows you to analyze your consumption with user-defined tags at the project/folder level. This helps identify projects, cost centers, departments or other tagged workloads with high utilization, helping your administrators focus their attention on what is driving their consumption and identifying areas for optimization. Tags can be used across linked environments and data management assets can be attached to multiple tags. This sets up the groundwork to view the IPU usage breakdown by tags in the IDMC dashboard, thus helping companies visualize IPU consumption at varied levels.

Figure 2: Metering dashboard and tag manager page

As you scale your data management use case and onboard different departments to use and consume your data management resources, you need a clear line of sight into what is being used and by whom. This level of transparency allows companies to allocate resource costs directly to individual departments or teams such as marketing, sales, finance, human resources, etc. Making users responsible for their usage, thereby encouraging them to monitor and manage their resource consumption efficiently, promotes transparency, accountability and cost optimization. You can use tagging to label workloads across your company by cost centers and departments. This enables tracking of aggregated IPU consumption for all data management services. As a result, you can collaborate with various departments on internal chargeback agreements, manage costs and plan for future consumption strategies.

Figure 3: Tag breakdown page that shows departmental chargeback information

Companies want to get better insights to optimize resource allocation, identify potential cost savings, improve user experience, troubleshoot issues and make informed decisions about future data management strategies. They need ways to extract and view their data management consumption and apply analytics on top of the consumption data to make informed choices for the future. With IDMC, you can generate an IPU consumption report and export it as a CSV file, providing detailed information about IPU usage across different assets, projects and folders within your organization; you can also access this data through the Informatica REST API to automate the export process to cloud data stores of your choice. You can marry your IDMC consumption with your cloud consumption data for comprehensive usage analytics using BI tools or other observability platforms.

Figure 4: Asset breakdown page with sample export file

Embrace a future where every dollar spent propels innovation. Gain more granular insights and control over your data management resources with IDMC’s robust platform supported by IPU management. Align these resources with your FinOps observability goals, ensuring cost efficiency and operational excellence. This approach isn't merely about tracking consumption; it's about transforming your approach to data management resources to unlock strategic value and drive business growth. Now is the time to take control of your data landscape, manage expenditures and empower every department to contribute to a culture of cloud cost optimization.

To learn more about IDMC and IPU management, there are several places to start:

Visit our IPU pricing page.
Read 5-Minute Pricing Guide for Informatica Processing Units (IPU)
Check out our in-depth Demo Center and stay up to date with IDMC capabilities.

¹https://www.ciodive.com/news/cloud-storage-overspend-wasabi/740940/
²https://www.harness.io/finops-in-focus