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Are you bleeding money in the Cloud? It’s more common than you think

Published on

May 24, 2021

Problem: You moved to public cloud for agility, scale, and cost savings, but your bill keeps climbing.
Reality check: The truth? You’re probably overspending. And you’re far from alone.
Solution: Interactive’s Cloud Waste Checklist reveals 24 ways to trim fat, fast.

Once seen as a revolutionary shift, public cloud has now become standard operating procedure for modern IT teams. But while provisioning is faster than ever, cost management hasn’t kept up. Behind the scenes, workloads that were once tightly managed are often left to drift – eating away at budgets silently.

The problem? For starters, most teams simply don’t have the bandwidth or specialist cloud expertise to track every new service, pricing shift, or expiring reserved instance. And the pace of change is relentless: public cloud providers are rolling out new services and cost models almost weekly.

Unless you’re monitoring those updates full-time (which, let’s face it, probably isn’t your core business), it’s easy to miss out on savings – or worse, stay locked into high-cost setups while better options fly under the radar.

The stakes are high. Gartner estimates up to 70% of cloud spend is wasted; money that could be reallocated to innovation, staffing, or customer experience.

“Organizations with little or no cloud cost optimization plans rush into cloud technology investments,” Gartner warns. “They end up overspending on cloud services by up to 70% without deriving the expected value from it.”

But identifying the problem is just the first step. As Gartner points out, cloud overspending doesn’t stem from a single source; instead, it’s a combination of issues like ungoverned costs, unanticipated usage, missed commitments, overprovisioning, and even poor architecture or code.

So, let’s take a look at three key ways organisations are unknowingly burning budget on unnecessary cloud spend – and what signs to watch for.

Too big, too idle, too expensive

Overprovisioned and underutilised resources are silent budget killers. Sadly, it happens all the time. Maybe you chose a larger instance ‘just to be safe’. Maybe you selected the wrong tier by mistake. Or maybe your needs have simply changed over time.

The result? You’re paying for more than you use.

Let’s face it: Cloud isn’t a one-size-fits-all model. In fact, a close look at your usage data can reveal where you’re underutilising key resources like storage volumes, data warehouses, or relational databases. Idle caching tools, bloated containers and forgotten test environments are other frequent culprits.

Additionally, you could also be using pricier resources than needed. Hosting regions vary in cost, and shifting workloads could unlock immediate savings. And if you’re stuck with a provider just out of habit, it might be time to revisit that decision, especially if another offers a better deal for your evolving needs.

Quick win

Review usage metrics and start trimming. A 10% reduction in underused storage and compute can unlock serious savings.

Missed savings on reserved capacity

Think of this as the ‘discount dilemma.’ Cloud providers now offer a range of flexible pricing models, but if you’ve defaulted to ‘on demand,’ you could be spending far more than necessary.

For predictable workloads, reserved instances (AWS, Azure) or committed use discounts (Google Cloud) often deliver great value. For fluctuating demand, scaling groups can keep costs in check. Batch processing? Consider low-priority or spot instances.

On the flip side, reserved instances only deliver savings when fully utilised. If you locked in capacity but haven’t aligned your workloads, you might be overpaying anyway.

Hot tip

Check your monthly bill. If your reservations aren’t being used effectively, either adjust your workloads or ditch the reservations. And keep tabs on expiry dates. If you don’t act in time, you’ll default back to higher rates.

Key insight Check the details of your monthly bill to ensure you are actually using reservations – and if you are not maximising them, adjust workloads so you do, or get rid of them.

Cloud graveyard you’re still paying for

Cloud environments are dynamic. Over time, infrastructure shifts, but not always cleanly. That’s how ‘zombie’ resources end up quietly draining your budget. At the same time, orphaned resources are everywhere too – and they’re not free.

Zombie resources are any unused or underutilised cloud assets quietly racking up costs, while orphaned resources are a common type of zombie. Smply put, they are leftover components no longer connected to active workloads.

Overall, we’re talking about things like:

Snapshots of systems long gone
Load balancers without any active instances
Idle storage volumes
Unused machine images

These are easy to overlook, especially if no one’s actively combing through the environment. On top of that, legacy resource types can lock you into paying more than newer, better options.

What’s more, terminating a virtual machine doesn’t always mean you’ve stopped paying for it. Snapshots, unattached volumes, idle load balancers, machine images, and object storage can all get left behind. These forgotten remnants quietly rack up costs in the background.

It’s like leaving the lights on in an empty house, but at enterprise scale. Or think of it like your energy plan. Tthe deal you signed up for 12 months ago might not be the best today. And if you’re not looking, you’re probably overpaying while others are benefiting from the latest rates.

The bottom line: Cloud vendors regularly roll out new, more cost-effective services. If you’re still running older versions, it’s worth doing an audit to make sure you’re not stuck on outdated (and overpriced) options.

Cloud zombie alert

Regularly sweep your environment for unused images, volumes, and resources. If it’s not being used, get rid of it.

Falling behind the curve

Undoubtedly, innovation moves fast. The cloud landscape changes almost weekly. New pricing models, regions, instance types, and cost-optimisation tools are constantly introduced.

If anything, staying current requires time, tooling, and deep expertise, which many internal teams just don’t have.

Meanwhile, your competitors may already be reaping the benefits of lower rates and smarter provisioning strategies. If you’re not evolving with the platform, you’re effectively subsidising those who are.

Cloud providers are continually releasing new versions, almost always at a lower price than their predecessors, so it pays to check your infrastructure continuously for outdated legacy resource types.

Take back control of your cloud spend

So the good news? Waste is fixable.

We’ve taken our years of hands-on cloud optimisation experience and created a single punchy guide: The Cloud Waste Checklist. It delivers 24 practical, high-impact tips that shine a light on the hidden sources of spend, and what to do about them.

Whether you’re a cloud-native startup or a traditional enterprise scaling up, the checklist delivers: