Cloud waste is rising again
The Flexera 2026 State of the Cloud report, published on 18 March 2026 from more than 750 cloud decision-makers and users, estimates that 29% of IaaS and PaaS spend is wasted. It is the first increase in five years: dynamic AI usage, harder rightsizing decisions and new pricing metrics are making visibility difficult again.
- 85% of respondents cite managing cloud costs as a top challenge.
- 63% have an established FinOps team, and 71% a Cloud Center of Excellence.
This figure is based on respondents' estimates, not on measured billing data. It still gives an order of magnitude consistent with what we see in our engagements.
AI has become FinOps teams' priority
The FinOps Foundation's State of FinOps 2026 report (1,192 respondents, published 19 February 2026) shows a discipline that is broadening:
| Scope managed by FinOps teams | Share of respondents |
|---|---|
| AI spend | 98% (31% two years earlier) |
| SaaS | About 90% |
| Licensing | 64% |
| Private cloud | 57% |
| Data centers | 48% |
Workload optimization remains the top priority, but mature teams see diminishing returns: the big obvious waste is gone, leaving many smaller savings that are harder to capture. Governance, forecasting and unit economics are rising in the priorities.
Standards are maturing
The FOCUS specification, a common format for billing data, has reached version 1.4. Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle and about fifteen other providers are among the FOCUS data generators listed by the FinOps Foundation.
What we see in the field
Our own figures, from eight years of engagements in large enterprises and SMEs, on Azure and AWS:
| Indicator | Order of magnitude |
|---|---|
| Recoverable share of the bill when nothing is managed | ≈ 35% on average |
| Discount from a Reserved Instance or savings plan on a production VM | ≈ 50% |
| Savings from auto Stop + Start on demand on non-prod | ≈ 90% |
| Fixed-schedule Stop/Start | 50 to 60% |
| Log costs after filtering and right retention | Up to 4 times lower |
| Untagged resources when we arrive, then after governance | 35%, then 0.1% |
| A bill drifting by 5% a month | +80% in a year |
| Total savings delivered | Over €20M |
Sources
- Flexera, 2026 State of the Cloud Report, 18 March 2026.
- FinOps Foundation, State of FinOps 2026, 19 February 2026.
- FinOps Foundation, FOCUS Specification.
- FinOps Pilote, engagement observations 2018-2026 (orders of magnitude, no client data).