Illustrative impact based on published industry benchmarks — not results from a specific client.
Average cloud spend that goes to waste, industry-wide
Orgs calling cloud-spend management their top cloud challenge (Flexera)
Global public cloud spend forecast
The challenge
A growing SaaS company's cloud bill grew faster than its user base, and finance had no reliable way to attribute spend to product lines — idle and oversized resources were suspected but never actually measured.
Our approach
We implement tag-based cost allocation across every account, right-size EC2/RDS instances from real 30-day utilization data, move steady-state workloads onto Reserved Instances or Savings Plans, and enforce automated idle-resource cleanup via Terraform guardrails.
Expected impact
Flexera's 2024-2025 State of the Cloud research puts average cloud waste at 27% and found 84% of organizations call managing cloud spend their top cloud challenge — the two numbers this audit is built to move.
Flexera's State of the Cloud research has put average cloud waste in the high-20s percent range for several years running, and found 84% of organizations call managing cloud spend their top cloud challenge — while Gartner forecasts global public cloud spend climbing past $723B, meaning the absolute dollars at stake keep growing even as the waste percentage holds roughly steady.
Where the waste typically hides
Cloud waste rarely comes from one obvious culprit — it accumulates across idle dev/staging environments left running over weekends, oversized instances provisioned for a traffic spike that never repeated, and orphaned storage volumes nobody remembers attaching. The chart below shows a typical first-audit breakdown before cleanup.
Where cloud spend typically leaks
A common first-audit breakdown before a FinOps cleanup
Illustrative first-audit split consistent with Flexera's published waste-driver categories — every environment differs.
| Slice | Share of spend |
|---|---|
| Idle / oversized compute | 34% |
| Unmonitored API & storage calls | 22% |
| Redundant environments | 14% |
| Right-sized & optimized | 30% |
Tagging before cutting
The audit starts with tagging, not cutting: every resource gets attributed to a team and product line before anything is resized or shut down, so the savings are durable rather than a one-time cleanup that drifts back within a quarter. Reserved Instances and Savings Plans absorb the predictable steady-state load; autoscaling and idle-resource guardrails, enforced via Terraform, handle the rest — the same infrastructure-as-code discipline behind our CI/CD modernization blueprint.
Built with
Frequently asked
- Is 27% cloud waste a real, current figure?
- Yes — Flexera's State of the Cloud research has put average cloud waste in the high-20s percent range for several consecutive years (27% in both the 2024 and 2025 reports), a stable, widely-cited industry figure, not an estimate we invented.
- Will rightsizing break anything in production?
- The audit works from 30 days of real utilization data before touching anything, and changes roll out gradually with monitoring in place — the goal is removing waste, not introducing new risk.
- Do we need Kubernetes for this to apply?
- No — tag-based cost allocation and rightsizing apply whether you're running EC2 instances directly, ECS, or EKS. The audit adapts to whatever compute model you're already running.
➜ ~ ready to ship
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