"We can do that kind of test more easily now because we have all this data, so we know which improvements to chase and how to prioritize them," Parthan said.

When Indeed moved its production services from its on-premises data center to the cloud, executives recognized that they needed to determine how best to assess its cloud spending, said Jeff Davis, vice president of engineering.

"We hadn't had experience in managing cloud resources at scale, and we wanted to know if our approach was healthy and sustainable," Davis said.

Indeed wasn't concerned with whether its cloud spending was less than its on-premises costs, he said. The company switched to the cloud for improved security, resiliency and application development capabilities. It needed a metric that looked beyond the dollar amount it paid to its cloud providers; it required a measure that would include all the IT and business-related considerations.

To determine accurately whether the company's cloud strategy was on the right track, software engineer leaders and IT leadership proposed a data-driven metric called "cloud spend as a percentage of revenue," which they call CSPR internally.

"CSPR was developed to determine if we are doing the right thing for the business and to let us answer that question continually over time," Davis said.

Cloud spend as a percentage of revenue isn't just a number to report; it helps Indeed determine how it will spend its resources. If the number gets too high, it signals to the company that it should focus its engineering efforts on cost optimization to bring CSPR into the target range. If it gets low, that indicates that Indeed should consider new cloud investments and innovation to support business growth or risk reduction. If it falls within the target range, the company is spot on with its allocations.

"It's powerful because it lets us know how the business is doing, how much we're spending on this infrastructure and how that compares with our own historical data and our peers," Davis said. "It helps us know how much we should invest in optimization, or whether we should spend on innovation."

The engineering team applied its standard approach to develop cloud spend as a percentage of revenue, starting with a proof of concept to prove value and then iterating on it.

The team collected historical data, mainly on hosting costs and top-line revenue. Staff from the finance and procurement departments aided in the effort, supplying additional data for past on-premises spending costs to help provide a baseline for analysis.

Project leaders also collected cloud spending data from peers to help Indeed benchmark against companies in its industry. This was one of the most challenging parts of creating CSPR, Davis said. Most of the data came from revenue statements issued by publicly held companies or professional networks. Cloud spend as a percentage of revenue also pulls data from cloud providers using APIs.

The team worked with a spreadsheet to start but added automation and additional tools to reduce the manual workload. CSPR now uses Indeed's analytics platform, Imhotep, which can hold data and support ad hoc and automated reporting needs.

Creating CSPR was not a daunting undertaking, which shows that "making data-driven decisions doesn't have to be overly complicated," Davis said.