May 22, 2025
The View from 30,000 Feet: What’s Happening with Cloud Spend?
Let’s not sugarcoat it. Cloud inflation is real, and it’s not just your imagination. According to Flexera’s 2025 State of the Cloud report, 84% of enterprises list cloud spend management as their number one concern. That’s not just finance teams talking. It’s CISOs, CIOs, and engineering leads alike.
Why? Because the dream of the cloud — scalable, elastic, self-healing infrastructure — has met the reality of surprise egress fees, idle workloads, and overprovisioned environments. Meanwhile, the push for GenAI and LLM-powered everything means compute bills are creeping up quietly in the background. This isn’t just a cost problem. It’s a visibility problem.
Hidden Fees, Lost Dollars
Let’s talk numbers. In 2023, Gartner reported that 69% of enterprises experienced cloud budget overruns. That’s not margin-of-error territory, that’s systemic.
Many of these costs come from sources that are too often ignored. Data egress fees, for instance, accumulate quickly when teams shuffle workloads across regions. Zombie workloads — long-forgotten dev environments or autoscaling experiments gone stale — consume resources quietly and continuously. Then there’s the overkill on performance specs: provisioned IOPS, compute tiers, and memory sizes that go far beyond actual usage patterns.
The bottom line? Most teams don’t intend to overspend. They just don’t have the mechanisms in place to stop it from happening.
Enter FinOps + AI: Your New Cloud Cost Power Combo
This is where FinOps makes its entrance, not as a buzzword but as a real operational framework. In 2025, over half of enterprises (59%) have a dedicated FinOps function. And the leading teams aren’t just watching cost dashboards. They’re doing something about it before the monthly invoice hits. FinOps is essentially DevOps with a budget. It’s about cross-functional collaboration, with finance setting the goals, engineering owning the usage, and product aligning on the tradeoffs.
When AI enters the picture, it adds a powerful layer of prediction and automation. Instead of reacting to bills after the fact, organizations can anticipate usage spikes, receive real-time prompts to rightsize underutilized resources, and even auto-shutdown idle staging environments during off-hours. The synergy of FinOps and AI transforms cloud cost management from reactive budgeting into proactive optimization.
What the Smartest Teams Are Doing Now
High-performing teams don’t treat cloud costs as a quarterly check-in. They operationalize visibility. They implement real-time monitoring, not just alerts, so everyone from engineering to execs can see spend as it happens. They mandate resource tagging because unlabeled infrastructure is a black hole in any cost report. And crucially, they invest in education. When developers understand what compute time and egress actually cost, they architect with efficiency in mind.
Contract negotiation has evolved too. It’s no longer about locking into flat rates. It’s about using FinOps data to justify commitments that align with usage trends. Some teams even run weekly “cloud cost standups,” bringing finance, engineering, and product leads together for 15 minutes of clarity that prevents hours of budget firefighting later.
But Wait — Isn’t AI Expensive Too?
Yes, GenAI workloads are compute hogs. But the trick is to let AI pay for itself. If you’re using it to generate internal marketing copy, fine. If you’re using it to automate your CI/CD environments, that’s a different ROI story. Modern FinOps tooling now includes GenAI cost attribution, so you can track which models are burning through GPUs and which ones are just loitering in staging. Level-up your efforts and leverage the expertise of a Managed Services Provider to manage this for you.
Again, it’s not about cutting. It’s about justifying.
The Bottom Line: See, Align, Act
Controlling cloud costs in 2025 isn’t about pulling the plug on innovation. It’s about seeing what you’re actually spending, aligning that spend with business outcomes, and acting in near real-time to course-correct. The organizations that master this don’t just save money. They move faster, scale smarter, and build more sustainable tech cultures.
And that’s worth a lot more than shaving a few cents off an EC2 instance.
About Mindsight
Mindsight delivers enterprise managed services and technology solutions to the mid-market across a variety of industries including manufacturing, financial services, government, education – just to name a few. Our solution architects and engineers are 100% expert-level and work as an extension of your IT team. Mindsight is headquartered in Downers Grove, IL, a suburb of Chicago.
Mindsight is part of the ACP CreativIT Family of Technology Solution Providers