Stop Pouring Money into Cloud Providers: The Cost of Inaction

Buying and running cloud services shouldn’t be that different from buying and servicing a car. When you purchase a car, you don’t blindly trust the salesperson and you don’t assume the dealer’s inspection is the full picture. You get an independent check. And once you own it, you maintain it - because ignoring the warning lights eventually becomes expensive.

Yet for some reason, when it comes to cloud spend, organisations put extraordinary levels of faith in native tools, or worse - use nothing at all. Too much trust, too little visibility and almost no discipline in cost control and optimisation. It's a potentially costly mix.

Cloud has become the great enabler, yet that same complexity obscures waste at scale, turning it into the perfect cash cow for providers. In today's economic climate, one where restructures and budget pressure are very real, continuing to waste 10–30% of cloud spend on redundant services, orphaned resources, and poorly optimised workloads is not only irresponsible; it's avoidable...

The visibility crisis

Most organisations can’t answer basic questions about their cloud consumption:

•    What are our business units actually spending?
•    How do we accurately forecast month-end?
•    What uplift should we expect after a new cloud project goes live?

The common behaviours are telling. We treat cloud spend like a utility bill: we wince, we pay, and we move on. Nothing changes.

Part of the problem is ownership. IT teams focus on performance and finance focuses on the budget line. Product focuses on feature delivery yet no one owns the full picture.  Without ownership, waste becomes normalised or worse, not identified

Why native tools aren’t enough

Cloud providers give you tooling like Azure Advisor, AWS Cost Explorer, Google Cost Management. But these tools only show you what the vendor wants you to see. They won’t challenge your licensing model and they won’t question whether your Reserved Instances make sense. They certainly won’t prioritise reducing your spend.

These companies are not malicious, they’re rational. Their entire revenue model depends on you consuming more and their account managers optimise within clear boundaries: grow usage, grow revenue, hit targets.

AI can amplify the problem

This challenge is about to accelerate. AI workloads are consumption-heavy and unforgiving when left unattended.
We recently saw a client spike $5,000 in a single day due to a misconfigured AI workload. Fortunately, it was caught halfway through the month. Had it gone unnoticed, the cost would have doubled. Most organisations would have never seen it until the invoice arrived.

This is the reality of modern cloud consumption: one mistake or lack of process can rapidly snowball into tens of thousands of dollars.

The human cost of wasted spend

The uncomfortable truth is that while organisations are cutting roles of real people, they are simultaneously pouring money into global public cloud providers through unmanaged cloud waste.

Eliminating unnecessary spend should be the first lever pulled, not the last. Cutting people before cutting waste is backwards.

Facing the hard truth

Starting this journey is never easy. You will uncover waste. You will have moments of “How were we missing this?” You may even find legacy decisions that were never revisited.

But taking action is better than continuing the cycle of inaction.

And if you go through assessment and discover everything is optimised - great. Be proud. But treat cloud like a vehicle warranty inspection: just because it passes in 2026 doesn’t mean it will in 2028 if you stop the upkeep.

Where the waste lives

20-35% of cloud spend remains wasted globally. The patterns are universal:

• Idle and orphaned resources - development environments left running, unattached storage, snapshots without lifecycle rules
• Over‑provisioned compute - instances running at 10–20% utilisation
• Storage inefficiency - lifecycle policies alone can deliver 45–55% savings
• Data transfer costs - a common blind spot with 45–55% optimisation potential
• Platform sprawl - Databricks, Snowflake and others stacked on top of core cloud infrastructure increase complexity and cost

None of this requires “cutting back.” It requires discipline, visibility, and continuous optimisation.

What FinOps actually means

FinOps isn’t a buzzword; it’s the operational discipline cloud has always needed:

1.    Inform – Achieve full visibility.

2.    Optimise – Identify and remove waste.

3.    Operate – Embed governance so it stays optimised.

Most organisations see significant 25–30% cost reduction in the first 90 days from eliminating waste alone.

But FinOps is not a one-off project. Cloud is dynamic. Costs drift. Without continuous oversight, waste inevitably returns.

Why independent assessment matters

Just like a car inspection, an independent view of your cloud is critical.

You need someone who:

• Has no sales quota.

• Has no incentive for you to spend more.

• Gets paid the same whether your costs rise or fall.

And you need tools that provide a unified view across Azure, AWS, GCP, Databricks, Snowflake because native tools do not and will not do this.

Independent oversight brings reality into focus.

Conclusion

Cloud waste is real, significant, and entirely avoidable. Organisations must stop pouring money into cloud providers and start taking ownership of the environment they rely on.

With the right visibility, the right tools, and independent oversight, organisations can reclaim substantial spend before cutting jobs, before slashing budgets, and before compromising innovation.

The path forward exists. It starts with facing the truth, asking uncomfortable questions and choosing action over inaction.

Sources:
Flexera State of the Cloud Report, 2025    
Boston Consulting Group, Price Swings, Sovereignty Demands, and Wasted Resources, 2025