Most companies moved to the cloud to spend less on infrastructure and more on running the business. For several years the numbers moved in the right direction. In 2026 they turned. Flexera’s annual State of the Cloud report, based on a survey of more than 750 cloud decision-makers and users, found that organizations estimate 29 percent of their cloud spend is wasted, the first increase in five years.
Flexera’s own explanation is instructive. The report points to newer workloads, especially generative AI, which 81 percent of respondents now use, and to environments that have grown more complicated: 73 percent run hybrid setups, and purchasing decisions are increasingly spread across teams instead of made once by one person. Waste does not usually come from one big mistake. It accumulates from many small decisions that nobody owns.
For a business without a dedicated finance and engineering team, the causes are familiar. Servers created for a test and never turned off. Storage that keeps growing because nothing expires. Machines sized for a peak that happens twice a year. Development and staging environments running all night and all weekend. Duplicate tools bought by two departments. And no one whose job it is to look.
Photo: Taylor Vick on Unsplash
Larger organizations answer this with a discipline called FinOps: measuring cloud spend, assigning it to owners, and reviewing it on a schedule. In Flexera’s survey, 63 percent of organizations have an established FinOps team. Most small and mid-size businesses cannot justify a full-time role for it, but they can adopt the routine.
A monthly routine that works at any size. Tag every resource with the team or project that owns it, so every dollar on the bill has a name next to it. Set a budget and an alert at 80 percent of it, so the first surprise arrives by email instead of on the invoice. Review the five largest line items each month and ask what each one is for. Shut down non-production environments outside working hours. Delete what is unattached, unused, or unowned. And wait to commit to long-term pricing plans until usage has been stable for a few months, because a commitment made on a bad estimate is waste with a contract attached.
Cost alone is the wrong measure. A bill that doubles because the business doubled is healthy. A bill that grows while usage stays flat is not. Track cloud cost per customer or per order, so that the number that matters moves with the business.
This is work a managed IT arrangement can absorb: someone who tags, watches the bill, and brings a one-page summary each month of what changed and what needs a decision. We set up this routine for clients moving to the cloud, and for those already there whose bill has drifted.
