High spending reflects companies’ growing reliance on cloud platforms and services for their business operations. That said, cloud bills can easily escalate out of control, thus defeating one of the primary goals of moving to the cloud—cost efficiency.
A recent report on ‘Global Cloud Storage Index” found that 62% of companies exceeded their cloud storage budget in 2024 – up from 53% in 2023. Similarly, the 2024 CloudZero report found that 14% of companies find their cloud costs as “way too high” in 2024 – up from 11% in 2022.
As more enterprises move their workload to the cloud, cloud inflation will continue to persist in 2025 and beyond. Cloud waste is one factor contributing to this continued inflation. Gartner estimates that 70% of the allocated cloud budget is wasted. Besides, 82% of IT decision-makers are incurring unnecessary cloud expenses.
Here’s a look at 5 factors that are contributing to high cloud bills:
- Idle or unused cloud resources
Enterprises incur cloud bills primarily based on the cloud services that they use. Heavy cloud usage can increase cloud expenses. However, the real problem is when they fail to scale down cloud resources during off-peak usage. 61% of cloud users don’t “right-size” their instances, while 58% don’t use reserved instances or savings plans.
Besides, 86% of professionals take at least one week to spot idle or unused cloud resources. When spread across distributed environments (or locations), companies can easily overlook idle resources in the form of virtual machines, load balancers, data storage, and databases.
- Improper resource allocation
Apart from controlling waste, effective resource allocation is also critical for reducing cloud expenses. Without proper allocation, enterprises either “over-provision” their cloud resources, thus increasing costs – or “under-provision” which can impact performance.
Over-provisioning can lead to a 67% rise in cloud service budgets. 58% of professionals are unable to find the right cloud offering for their enterprise workload. To cut down these costs, enterprises need automatic scaling to allocate cloud resources – based on real-time demand and performance.
- Lack of visibility
A 2025 FinOps report found that only 43% of business leaders have end-to-end visibility into their cloud environment. Without cloud visibility, companies cannot assess the cost impact of their cloud use. Similarly, application developers often default to over-provisioning to ensure optimum performance – without realizing its cost impact.
In product development companies, development teams are too “insulated away” from the underlying cloud infrastructure and provisioning. Effectively, they have little (or no) direct control over the allocation of resources like computing power, data storage, and memory consumption.
Overall, without real-time visibility into the cloud infrastructure, enterprises rely more on “guesswork” to optimize their cloud spending.
- Lack of FinOps culture
Cloud cost escalation is not simply attributed to high resource utilization and wastage. Most enterprises lack the FinOps culture, which requires multiple stakeholders to take responsibility and participate in cloud cost optimization.
According to the 2025 State of FinOps report, over 50% of FinOps practitioners are prioritizing workload optimization and cloud waste reduction. To adopt the best practices of FinOps, companies need a cultural shift to minimize resistance among their teams. Without this enabling culture, companies cannot engage their employees to realize the significance of cloud optimization.
- Inefficient cloud migration and modernization
Another leading factor in cloud cost escalation is inefficient cloud migration and modernization. 75% of cloud migration projects fail, while only 37% fail to achieve to achieve their business objective.
Besides migration, enterprises are not modernizing their business applications to leverage cloud benefits or capabilities. Along with cloud migration, enterprises need an efficient cloud modernization plan to maximize their benefits and reduce costs.
Additionally, depending on the scale of their legacy systems, enterprises can take anywhere between a few months to years to implement the entire migration and modernization process. This can also add to their cloud expenses.
Best practices & tips to prevent cloud cost escalation
Through effective cloud cost optimization, enterprises can monitor and control their cloud expenses. Cost optimization is not a “one-time” activity but a continuous process that requires both operational oversights and visibility.
Here are some of the best practices and tips for effective cost optimization:
- Understanding your cloud bill.
For effective cost management, you must first understand their cloud bills for all inclusions and exclusions. Here are some of the cost areas:
- Computing and processing power
- Data storage
- Managed services
- Customer support
2. Gain real-time visibility.
With real-time visibility, you can determine the cloud resources that you are paying for. Cloud cost tracking tools like AWS CloudWatch and Microsoft Cost Management can help you extract real-time cost insights from your cloud environment.
3. Adopt the FinOps best practices.
Here are the best FinOps practices that you can implement in your enterprise:
- Define a clear cloud budget and align your cloud implementation with your business objectives.
- Assign FinOps roles and responsibilities to the right team of FinOps practitioners and architects.
- Tag your cloud assets according to the project, environment, and cost center.
- Implement an efficient cloud governance framework for compliance and risk management.
- Implement automatic scaling.
4. Manual scaling often leads to overprovisioning and cloud cost escalation. Through automatic scaling (or auto-scaling), you can dynamically assign cloud resources according to actual usage. As a container orchestration system, Kubernetes can help in the automatic deployment and scaling of cloud applications.
Conclusion
Despite all its numerous benefits, cloud costs remain a serious challenge for fast-growing companies, thus leading to wasted money and unutilized resources. Due to a lack of real-time visibility, most enterprises fail to even understand their growing cloud bills.
With its expertise in cloud engineering, Trinus has partnered with global companies and delivered services in:
- Cloud migration and modernization
- Cloud monitoring
- Cloud application development
- Server virtualization
Do you want to gain control over your cloud bills? We can help you. Get in touch to know more.