Cloud spend is the top cloud challenge
In Flexera's 2025 State of the Cloud report, 84% of organizations said managing cloud spend is their top cloud challenge. The cloud makes it easy to start resources and just as easy to forget them. Most savings come from a handful of predictable places.
Where the money usually goes
Check these areas first:
- Idle or oversized servers and databases sized for peak load that never comes
- Development and test environments running 24/7
- Unattached storage volumes, old snapshots, and forgotten backups
- Data transfer charges between regions and out to the internet
- Steady workloads paying on-demand rates instead of committed-use discounts
- Logs and metrics kept far longer than anyone needs
- Premium tiers of managed services that a standard tier would handle
A 30-day plan
You don't need a large project to find meaningful savings:
- Week 1: Turn on cost reporting by service, account, and tag; identify the top ten cost drivers
- Week 2: Delete or stop unused resources; schedule non-production environments to shut down after hours
- Week 3: Right-size the largest servers and databases based on actual usage
- Week 4: Evaluate committed-use discounts for steady workloads; set budgets and alerts
Make it a habit, not a one-time cleanup
Costs drift back without ownership. Tag every resource with an owner and project, review spend monthly, set budget alerts, and include cost in architecture decisions. Many teams call this practice FinOps — shared accountability for cloud spending between engineering and finance.
Never trade reliability or security for savings. Confirm backups, redundancy, and monitoring before downsizing anything critical.
Want an independent review of your cloud costs? Our technical assessment includes a cloud cost and performance review with prioritized recommendations.