Enterprises could waste up to $44.5 billion in cloud spending this year as a rift between engineering and FinOps teams hampers cost efficiency, according to research from Harness.
Enterprises estimate that 21% of their cloud infrastructure spend is wasted on underutilized resources, Harness found, with the majority of surveyed engineering staff putting this down to a disconnect between two key departments.
52% blamed wasted spend on a lack of synergy between FinOps and developers, with 55% reporting that they ignore cost management. Just 35% said they measure cloud cost efficiency as a measure of success.
Most developers see cost optimization as someone else’s problems, Harness revealed, leading to over-provisioned resources, idle instances, and inefficient architectures that can drain budgets.
“Cloud efficiency isn’t just a numbers game—it’s about creating a culture of cost awareness where enterprises shift their FinOps practices left, so engineers understand how their architectural choices directly impact both performance and financial outcomes,” Ravi Yadalam, senior director of product management at Harness, said.
“Developers must become equal partners in their cloud cost management strategy, gaining full visibility into spend before deployment so they can identify cloud waste and automatically eliminate it,” Yadalam added.
Engineering staff are on board with remedying the problem, with 62% seeking more control over, and responsibility for, managing cloud costs. However, the issue is few developers have the right tools for the job.
Just 32% of developers have fully automated practices in place to ensure cost efficiency, such as systems that shut down idle resources.
Less than half (43%) have full visibility into real-time data on idle cloud resources, while only 39% have full visibility into real-time data on cloud resources that are unused or orphaned. Just a third have this visibility into over or underprovisioned workloads.
Developers inherently default to over-provisioning resources without proper visibility, Harness said, thereby driving costs up. Developer environments often sit unused, test instances run indefinitely, and oversized resources lay dormant, Harness added.
Speaking to ITPro, Adam Weldon-Ming, cloud solution architect at OryxAlign, said enterprises must consider giving teams heightened visibility of cloud usage. In doing so, they can foster closer cross-functional alignment and reduce long-term costs.
“Proper tagging and resource allocation means each department knows exactly what they’re using and what it’s costing, making it easier to cut unnecessary spending,” Weldon-Ming said.
Cloud cost management is a recurring theme
Wasteful cloud spending has been high on the agenda of IT leaders for some time now, with research from early 2024 pointing the finger at short-sighted cost management strategies.
72% of companies exceeded their cloud budgets in the year previous, the study said, with one of the key issues being that most firms lacked proactive strategies in the earlier cloud architecture stages.
Just 6% of those surveyed said their cloud cost strategies were as proactive as possible, while only 40% said they were containing costs at the “solution architecture stage.”
“Businesses accelerated their cloud adoption based on the promise of more flexibility, and superior economics in terms of labor costs and infrastructure operations. However, while the cloud offers automation and scalability, hidden expenses are putting pressure on organizations,” Gigamon technical evangelist for EMEA, Mark Jow, told ITPro.
“Data transfers, especially those from public clouds to private data centers, and communications between databases and front-end services can add up quickly, generating large volumes of billable traffic and big monthly bills,” Jow added.
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