Enterprises set to waste billions due to lack of cloud cost awareness among developers

A disconnect between FinOps and development teams is leading to wasted spend on cloud infrastructure costs according to 52 percent of engineering leaders.

Research from software delivery platform Harness finds developers have limited insight into cloud waste. Fewer than half of respondents say they have access to real time data on idle cloud resources (43 percent), unused or orphaned resources (39 percent), and over or under-provisioned workloads (33 percent).

Without a clear picture of cloud resource requirements, 55 percent of developers say purchasing commitments are ultimately based on guesswork. As a result, enterprises estimate that 21 percent of their cloud infrastructure spend is wasted on underutilized resources, equating to an estimated $44.5 billion in 2025 alone.

"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," says John Bonney, CFO at Harness. "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."

The study finds there's a lack of transparency across organizations when sharing cloud spend data. Most organizations are failing to set up fundamental cloud cost optimization best practices. 71 percent of developers don't carry out spot orchestration, 61 percent don't rightsize instances, 58 percent don't use reserved instances or savings plans, and 48 percent don't track idle resources. Only 32 percent of developers have fully automated practices to enforce cost-savings such as shutting down idle resources.

But despite these failings 62 percent of developers want more control over, and responsibility for, managing cloud infrastructure costs.

"The reality is developers don't often view cost optimization as a priority. This disconnect leads to overprovisioned resources, idle instances, and inefficient architectures that quietly drain budgets," says Ravi Yadalam, senior director of product management at Harness. "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."

The full report is available on the Harness site.

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