The $200 Billion Problem Nobody Talks About
According to Flexera’s 2025 State of the Cloud report, organizations waste 29% of their cloud spend. That’s not a rounding error — across the industry, it adds up to over $200 billion per year in pure waste.
The frustrating part? Most of this waste is completely fixable. It’s not architectural debt or legacy migration costs. It’s idle resources, overprovisioned instances, and storage nobody remembers creating.
Where the Money Actually Goes
Cloud waste falls into a few predictable buckets:
1. Idle Compute
Dev and staging environments that run 24/7 but are only used during business hours. That m5.xlarge your team spun up for a load test three months ago? Still running. Still billing.
Typical savings: 30-40% of non-production compute costs.
2. Overprovisioned Instances
Teams default to larger instance types “just in case.” A t3.large running at 8% CPU utilization could be a t3.small at a third of the cost — with no performance impact.
Typical savings: 20-35% of production compute costs.
3. Orphaned Storage
Unattached EBS volumes, obsolete snapshots, S3 buckets with no lifecycle policies. Storage is cheap per GB, but it compounds. A single team can accumulate thousands in monthly storage charges without noticing.
Typical savings: 15-25% of storage costs.
4. Unused Elastic IPs and Load Balancers
AWS charges for Elastic IPs that aren’t attached to running instances, and for load balancers with no targets. These are small charges individually but add up across accounts.
5. Missing Reserved Instance and Savings Plan Coverage
On-demand pricing for workloads that have been running steadily for months. If your production database has been on-demand for a year, you’ve overpaid by 30-40%.
Why Teams Don’t Fix It
It’s not that engineers don’t care about costs. It’s that:
- No one owns it. Cost optimization falls between engineering, finance, and ops — so nobody drives it.
- Visibility is fragmented. AWS Cost Explorer shows totals, but not which resources are wasteful.
- It’s tedious. Manually auditing hundreds of resources across multiple accounts takes days.
- Fear of breaking things. Downsizing an instance or deleting a volume feels risky without context.
See the IAN team run on your cloud. We connect to your AWS account via a scoped read-only role, run the Observe-tier agents, and leave you with a concrete audit report — cost waste, security exposure, compliance gaps, and a labor-offset estimate. You keep the findings regardless of next steps. Get a free infrastructure audit →
How AI Changes the Game
Modern cost optimization isn’t about hiring a FinOps analyst to review spreadsheets. It’s about continuous, automated scanning that:
- Identifies waste in real time — not in monthly reports
- Provides context — who created the resource, when, and whether anything depends on it
- Generates fix actions — not just alerts, but actual remediation steps or pull requests
- Tracks savings over time — proving ROI to leadership
IAN scans your AWS accounts continuously, identifies waste across all these categories, and generates specific remediation actions. For a team spending $75K/mo on cloud, we typically find $7,500–$22,000/mo in savings within the first audit.
Start Finding Your 29%
The first step is knowing where the waste is. Connect your AWS accounts to IAN and run your first cost audit — it takes five minutes, and the results usually pay for a full year of the platform.
Next step: talk to the team
30 minutes. We'll look at your cloud together and scope what we'd take off your plate — see pricing.