Steven Zolman

Oct. 16,2026 | Cloud, AI

You are not transforming. You are subsidizing. This is now visible in both the data and specific company outcomes. Mavvrik’s 2026 State of AI Cost Governance Report: Nearly half of organizations escalated unexpected AI costs to the board; 25% delayed or canceled initiatives; only 11% can forecast AI spend within ±10%. Flexera 2026 State of the Cloud: Waste on infrastructure and platform services rose to 29%, driven by AI workloads. Token prices have fallen sharply while enterprise AI bills have risen dramatically. AI to ROI Big Story: The AI Budget Dance is Underway Public examples of cost overruns and limited visibility: Uber - Exhausted ...

Fred Teekens

Aug. 18,2026 | Cloud, Azure, AWS, GCP

For the better part of a decade, the financial services industry has moved to a familiar beat: migrate core banking workloads, real-time settlement capabilities, and risk analytics to public cloud hyperscalers. Many tier-1 institutions now depend heavily on a very concentrated group of providers, primarily Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). That shift has delivered real benefits in speed, scalability, and access to innovation. But its also created a less comfortable reality: technology concentration. When many institutions rely on similar cloud control planes, DNS services, identity layers, and ...

Austin Zolman

Feb. 26,2026 | CFO, Cloud, CIO, Vendor Management, AI, FinOps

The 2026 IT Budget Surge: How to Turn 10%+ Increases into Measurable ROI, Not Vendor Windfalls The consensus with most analyst firms, is that worldwide IT spending is projected to reach $6.15 trillion in 2026, up 10%+ year over year, driven by an 80.8% surge in AI-related spending, a 31.7% jump in data center systems, and acceleration in software spend - projected to grow by over 14% driven by data analytics, cybersecurity, and integration of AI platforms into core business functions. At the enterprise level, 75% of CFOs expect tech budgets to rise, and 48% are planning increases of 10% or more. The largest allocations are going to IT, AI, ...

Fred Teekens

Jan. 29,2026 | Cloud, MSSP, Quantum Computing

Let's get to the point.... If your organization is still operating under the delusion that "quantum computing is a future problem," you're not just behind the curve; you're driving straight into a digital black hole. As a strategic advisor at NET(net), I see the fear, the confusion, and the and borderline negligence in meeting rooms worldwide. Your managed IT security? It could be managed right into the ground unless your teams are prepared now. "Q-Day" (the moment a fault-tolerant quantum computer can crack RSA-2048) is a question of "when," not "if", currently projected for the 2030's And frankly, you're missing the more insidious threat ...

Michael Welsh

Oct. 31,2025 | Cloud, Azure, AWS, GCP

The public-cloud market is hitting unprecedented scale in 2025. The three dominant service providers, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, continue to post record growth, fueled by generative AI, massive data flows, and enterprise migrations. According to market trackers, global cloud-infrastructure spending hit roughly US $99 billion in Q2 2025 alone, growing more than 25 % year-on-year. That scale is impressive, but the flip side is equally important. With scale comes structural exposure to over-consumption, waste, runaway costs, and sub-optimized deployments. This article reviews the numbers behind the “Big ...

Steven Zolman

May. 29,2024 | Cloud, Azure, AWS, google, Cloud Negotiation

Preface Nearly all clients are seeking greater prosperity in 2024. While client organizations are still focused on cost reductions to meet the challenges of their new economic and market realities, the pent-up demands of the business are increasingly calling for innovation, automation, and organizational performance improvement. Digital Transformation has emerged as the #1 Way to Boost Performance and Savings concurrently. Client organizations that are digitally transforming are harvesting greater value by: Automating tasks (RPA) to streamline efficiencies Unlocking data insights (ML) for better organizational (AI) decision-making Empowering ...

Steven Zolman

Jan. 2,2024 | Financial Services, Cognitive Transformation, CFO, Cloud, CIO, Digital Transformation, Blockchain, Infrastructure, Azure, AWS, google, CEO, AI

Preface Thank you for joining us to learn more about the Top 5 Digital Transformation strategies you can use to unlock prosperity in 2024. Nearly all clients are seeking greater prosperity in 2024. While the demands of the business are increasingly focused on innovation, automation, and organizational performance improvement, client organizations are still focused on cost reductions to meet the new economic and market realities. We foresee a volatile and unpredictable business landscape predicated on geopolitical tensions, economic uncertainty, and continued supply chain disruptions as client organizations continue to diversify their ...

Steven Zolman

Jul. 13,2023 | Cloud, Azure, AWS, GCP

Preface While cloud adoption has been growing rapidly since before the pandemic, in recent years, there are signs of a slowdown in the overall rate of growth. Several factors contribute to this trend: Price shock: As client organizations migrated their workloads to the cloud, they often underestimated the costs involved. While the cloud offers scalability and flexibility, it is not always the most cost-effective option, particularly for certain types of workloads. Some clients experience price shock when they receive their cloud bills, especially if they haven't properly optimized their resources, realized the implications of data movements, ...

Steven Zolman

Jul. 11,2023 | SaaS, Cloud, Infrastructure

Preface Many client organizations buy a Datadog subscription (at least initially) to monitor cloud application performance to identify and reduce cloud costs (generally as a result of inefficient processing). As time goes on, and the client organization expands its use of monitoring, these costs start to stack up. At some point, clients start wondering, ‘who is the Datadog for my Datadog’!? If you’re getting rolled by your Datadog subscription, you just may need to get that dawg in you. For real! Introduction Datadog is a monitoring and analytics platform for cloud-scale applications, providing monitoring of servers, databases, tools, and ...

Steven Zolman

Jun. 15,2023 | Cloud, Azure, AWS, google, GCP, Cloud Negotiation

Preface Despite a pervasive industry need, cloud cost optimization has not yet lived up to its potential. Clients are continuing to suffer from cloud cost overruns and efforts to cut costs have been largely ineffective. So then, what is the future for cost optimization with cloud solutions like AWS, Azure, and GCP? Background Review our recent 3-part series on Cloud Costs: Take a look back at our recently completed 3-part series on cloud costs, where we detailed the top 5 price shock phenomena of cloud computing, and how those shocking prices were often caused by migrated workloads that turned out not to be well suited for cloud computing ...