Enterprises are spending more than ever on cloud infrastructure, but much of that spend is going to waste. According to a 2025 industry report by Harness, 66% of developers estimate that at least 20% of their cloud infrastructure spend is wasted on underutilized or mismanaged resources.
Why the waste? Cloud spending is often tracked by finance teams (FinOps), while decisions about usage and provisioning happen in engineering. Traditional tools surface billing data but fail to offer the technical context necessary for engineers to take meaningful action. As a result, businesses fall into reactive cost reviews rather than proactive optimization.
From Surface-Level Cost Tools to Embedded Efficiency
Most cloud cost management platforms function like spreadsheets with charts. While they can be useful for financial visibility, they are insufficient for eliminating inefficiencies rooted in technical operations. That’s the fundamental gap PointFive aims to close.
Enter Cloud Efficiency Posture Management (CEPM), a new approach designed by PointFive to turn cloud optimization into a real-time, engineer-driven discipline. Inspired by the maturity of Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), CEPM brings the same level of rigor and automation to cloud efficiency.
“We started PointFive to solve cloud inefficiency at its root: the technical and operational reasons, not just surface-level cost management,” said Alon Arvatz, CEO and Founder of PointFive.
What Makes CEPM Different?
Unlike traditional tools that treat cloud cost as a financial report card, CEPM operates as an always-on diagnostic engine embedded within the engineering workflow. Its key features include:
- DeepWaste™ Analysis: PointFive’s proprietary DeepWaste™engine detects subtle inefficiencies that elude typical cost tools. These may include over-provisioned instances, unused persistent volumes, and overlooked autoscaling misconfigurations. More importantly, it provides context-aware recommendations that engineers can act on immediately.
- Seamless Integration with Engineering Workflow: Rather than expecting engineers to adopt a new tool, CEPM integrates into platforms already used, such as Jira, ServiceNow, Slack, and Microsoft Teams, turning cloud efficiency into part of their daily routine and not just an afterthought.
- Frictionless Deployment and Rapid ROI: With an agentless architecture, CEPM deploys via a single integration and begins delivering insights within minutes. Enterprises like Blackhawk Network, E.ON, Elastic, and Fanatics have reported measurable improvements in cloud efficiency within weeks of implementation.
- Multi-Cloud Optimization: PointFive’s CEPM supports AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), three providers with vastly different billing models and usage metrics. For example, Azure surfaces resource inefficiencies that might not exist on AWS. CEPM unifies these signals into a single efficiency posture, simplifying what would otherwise be a complex manual comparison.
A Strategic Shift in Cloud Operations
The timing of CEPM’s release is aligned with broader industry trends. A 2024 Forrester report found that 72% of enterprises now use more than one cloud provider, creating complexity in managing cost and performance across environments. Simultaneously, there’s a growing expectation that engineering must play a role in optimization. After all, cloud optimization should not be a periodic task or a reactive exercise.
CEPM-empowered engineering teams can continuously embed efficiency into daily operations, resulting in sustainable savings, improved system reliability, and greater agility across the organization.
The Future of Cloud Efficiency
As cloud environments grow more complex, the need for proactive, continuous optimization is becoming more business-critical. CEPM introduces a discipline that brings FinOps and engineering together, giving both sides the tools and context they need to work in sync.
The message is clear: It’s no longer enough to know what your cloud costs. You need to know why, where, and how to fix it.
