The Cloud Cost Crisis Is Real
The average company wastes 32% of its cloud spend according to Flexera's 2025 State of the Cloud report. For a $1M/month AWS bill, that is $320,000 thrown away monthly.
Top 10 Cost Optimisation Strategies
1. Right-Size Your EC2/VM Instances Most instances run at 10–30% CPU utilization. Use AWS Compute Optimizer or Azure Advisor to identify oversized instances.
2. Reserved Instances and Savings Plans For stable workloads, 1-year reserved instances save 40%; 3-year saves 60%. Commit only on proven, stable workloads.
3. Spot/Preemptible for Batch Workloads ML training, data processing, and rendering jobs can run on Spot instances at 70–90% discount.
4. S3/Blob Storage Lifecycle Policies
{
"Rules": [{
"Transitions": [
{"Days": 30, "StorageClass": "STANDARD_IA"},
{"Days": 90, "StorageClass": "GLACIER"},
{"Days": 365, "StorageClass": "DEEP_ARCHIVE"}
]
}]
}
5. Delete Zombie Resources Orphaned EBS volumes, unused Elastic IPs, forgotten NAT Gateways. Run a monthly audit.
6–10. Data Transfer, CDN, Auto-Scaling, FinOps Culture, Tagging Strategy
(See full article for details on each)
The FinOps Mindset
Cost optimisation is not a one-time project – it is a continuous engineering practice. Assign cloud cost ownership to engineering teams, not just finance.
Results
Average client result after 90-day optimisation engagement: 38% cost reduction with zero performance regression.