Enterprises set to waste USD $44.5bn on cloud by 2025

Organisations are projected to waste USD $44.5 billion on cloud infrastructure by 2025, according to new research by Harness.

The "FinOps in Focus 2025" report attributes this significant financial loss to the disconnect between FinOps and development teams within enterprises. The study, which surveyed 700 engineering leaders and developers across the US and the UK, highlights that the lack of cost awareness among developers leads to uncontrolled spending on cloud infrastructure.

According to the report, 52% of engineering leaders acknowledge that this disconnect is resulting in wasted expenditure on cloud infrastructure. Despite the prevalence of this issue, many developers have limited access to critical real-time data, such as idle cloud resources, which only 43% of respondents reported having. Additionally, 39% have access to data on unused or orphaned resources, and 33% can access over or under-provisioned workloads information.

John Bonney, Chief Financial Officer at Harness, commented on the findings: "Cloud infrastructure spend is one of the biggest line items for modern enterprises, right behind salary. Leadership teams should ask themselves if they are comfortable relying on guesswork to manage and optimize this spend. With a lack of visibility into cloud costs and constantly shifting requirements for workloads, needless inefficiencies and over-commitments are eating up resources and holding firms back when they are under pressure to do more with less."

Bonney suggests that automating cloud cost management can help companies manage their expenditure more effectively, thus eliminating waste and resulting in immediate savings. He noted that automating these processes also alleviates the stress of resource management for engineers while preventing unnecessary resource usage.

The report highlights a need for companies to increase transparency relating to cloud spend. Developers are typically incorporated too late in the cost optimization process, often lacking the insights required to appropriately manage cloud spending. A substantial 71% of developers do not engage in spot orchestration, 61% fail to right-size instances, 58% do not use reserved instances or savings plans, and 48% do not shut down idle resources.

Despite these gaps, over half of developers (62%) expressed a desire for greater control over cloud infrastructure costs. Currently, only 32% have fully automated practices for cost-saving measures like shutting down idle resources or rightsizing.

Considering these challenges, it takes enterprises an average of 31 days to identify and eliminate cloud waste such as idle, orphaned, or unused resources. It also takes about 25 days to detect and adjust over-provisioned cloud resources.

Ravi Yadalam, Senior Director of Product Management at Harness, discussed the cultural shift necessary to address these issues: "The reality is developers often view cost optimization as someone else's problem. This disconnect leads to overprovisioned resources, idle instances, and inefficient architectures that quietly drain budgets."

Yadalam emphasised that cloud efficiency involves fostering a culture of cost awareness: "Cloud efficiency isn't just a numbers game—it's about creating a culture of cost awareness where enterprises shift their FinOps practices left, so engineers understand how their architectural choices directly impact both performance and financial outcomes. Developers must become equal partners in their cloud cost management strategy, gaining full visibility into spend before deployment so they can identify cloud waste and automatically eliminate it."

The "FinOps in Focus 2025" report is based on a survey conducted by market research firm Coleman Parkes between November and December 2024 and involved participants from organisations with more than 1,000 employees.