Getting Serious About Cloud Cost Optimization: What Every Tech Leader Should Know
- Agu Aarna
- May 13
- 4 min read
Updated: May 20
Cloud platforms have become the backbone of digital transformation — but as flexibility grows, so does spend. And too often, that spend gets out of control without anyone truly noticing until it’s too late.
At Intium, we’ve seen time and again that 25–30% of cloud spend is unnecessary. Not because teams are careless, but because cloud cost management is rarely treated with the same rigor as other operational disciplines.
In this post, we distill key learnings from a recent cloud cost assessment into practical advice for technology leaders. Whether you're running on AWS, Azure, or GCP, these lessons apply—and they can unlock millions in savings and long-term cost control.
Have concerns about your cloud expenditure?
Cloud Cost Optimization is All About How You:
1. Start with a Cost Visibility Baseline
The first step in any cloud rationalization journey is understanding where the money is going. Across organizations we've assessed, the vast majority have:
No cost allocation by product or business unit limiting teams’ ability to take responsibility and assume accountability
Inconsistent or missing tagging on 40–60% of cloud resources making cloud resource usage opaque
Minimal or inefficient use of budgeting, forecasting, or alerting tools hindering action-biased cost management
Key benchmarks:
Only 10–20% of spend is clearly traceable to individual teams or services
Over 70% of cloud resources are not tagged in a way that supports chargeback or showback
🔍 Actionable Tip: Implement tagging standards and start enforcing them with automated policies. You can’t manage what you can’t see.
2. Look for the “Low-Hanging Fruit” in Resource Optimization
Our analysis consistently reveals that 15–20% of cloud spend comes from idle or oversized resources. These are resources running 24/7 when they’re only needed occasionally — or provisioned for peak load but never scaled down.
Common offenders:
Compute instances with <10% average CPU utilization
Storage volumes not attached to active resources
Staging environments left running overnight
Key benchmarks:
10–15% of compute resources can be right-sized without performance impact
5–10% of storage spend is on unattached or unnecessary volumes
🛠️ Actionable Tip: Start with an automated audit of low-utilization compute and unattached storage. Most cloud providers have built-in tools to help.
3. Reassess Commercial Commitments Strategically
Many companies sign up for reserved instances or savings plans — but without fully understanding workload patterns. Others don’t commit at all, fearing lock-in, and end up paying on-demand rates across the board.
Key benchmarks:
Effective discount utilization is often under 50%, when it should be 70–90%
Up to 10% of spend is lost due to underused or poorly aligned commitments
💡 Actionable Tip: Map your workloads into stable vs. variable. Commit only for the stable ones — and monitor usage monthly to avoid waste.
4. Integrate Finance, Product, and Engineering into Cloud Cost Ownership
One of the most transformative shifts you can make is building a culture of FinOps — a cross-functional model where cloud costs are owned collaboratively.
Too often:
Engineering builds for performance, not cost-efficiency
Finance gets surprised by cloud bills without clear insights
Product teams aren’t aware of the cost of new features or services
Key benchmarks:
Companies with clear ownership structures save 20–30% more on average
Mature FinOps practices can enable 2–4x faster decision-making on cost optimization
🤝 Actionable Tip: Create cost dashboards per team or product, and hold monthly cost reviews. When teams own their spend, they manage it.
5. Think Long-Term: Build a Cloud Operating Model, Not Just a Cleanup Project
While short-term savings are valuable, the real prize is a scalable, cost-conscious operating model. That means:
Cloud cost forecasting integrated into planning cycles
Automated alerts for anomalies and budget overruns
Architectural patterns that embed efficiency (e.g., serverless, auto-scaling)
🚀 Actionable Tip: Embed FinOps into your architecture review board, or appoint a Cloud Cost Champion or a lightweight Cloud Centre of Excellence to define and evolve best practices over time.
Final Thoughts
Cloud cost optimization isn’t about cutting corners — it’s about getting the most value for every euro you spend. That requires visibility, accountability, and smart automation.
Whether you’re spending €1 million or €50 million annually, start by asking:
Do we know who owns each part of our cloud spend?
Are we wasting money on idle or overprovisioned resources?
Are we using cloud-native tools to manage and forecast spend?
If the answer to any of those is “not really,” or “I don’t know”, now’s the time to act!
Ready to Get Started?
At Intium, we’ve helped several companies uncover and fix inefficiencies in their cloud setup — delivering 20–30% savings while improving cost accountability and planning.
Get in touch to book a Cloud Cost Assessment or learn more about building your FinOps maturity roadmap.
