3 ways to limit sky-high cloud costs with FinOps

Multicloud adoption continues to explode. In 2025, roughly 83% of enterprises leveraged multicloud strategies according to Data Stack Hub, with around 78% using hybrid architectures combining public, private, and edge deployments.

As organizations scale their cloud footprints, costs are climbing rapidly, making disciplined cost management more important than ever.

Enterprises waste an estimated 30-32% of cloud spend, totaling $200-230 billion annually, according to Byteiota. And 84% of organizations cite managing cloud spend as their greatest challenge, found the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report.

However, the shift toward a more mature FinOps practice is making a difference. According to the State of the FinOps 2025 Report, waste reduction and workload optimization are top priorities for FinOps practitioners, followed by full allocation of cloud spending and accurate spend forecasting.

The FinOps Framework is being widely adopted by a majority of large enterprises. “The FinOps Framework has been updated to reflect the present-day practice of FinOps as it evolves to a Cloud+ approach to managing technology spend,” per the FinOps Foundation.

“Over 70% of enterprises will adopt FinOps-aligned practices beyond cloud by 2026, with SaaS, AI, and licensing leading the charge,” according to ECI Research.

With cloud cost optimization top of mind, here are three tactical, high-impact FinOps practices your organization should embrace today:

1. Purge orphaned and idle resources

Unclaimed virtual servers, abandoned volumes/disks, dangling snapshots, and inactive databases are silent budget drains.

A good FinOps practice is to routinely automate the detection of unattached volumes/disks, IPs, and unused databases and virtual servers. Leverage tagging, auditing, and scheduled cleanups as part of governance routines.

As a best practice, apply hourly spend monitoring, proactive tagging, and rightsizing policies across all scopes, including cloud, software as a service (SaaS), and data center. A 5% maximum CPU utilization is a good starting metric to identify virtual servers that may need to be decommissioned. If you want to get your cloud costs under control, shutting down or eliminating unused resources is a key place to start.

2. Automate suspension for non‑production workloads

Development, test, quality assurance (QA), user acceptance testing (UAT), and staging environments don’t necessarily need to run 24/7.

Scheduled shutdowns on the weekends can help you save on your monthly compute cost. There might be cases where you can be more aggressive and implement shutdowns on weekdays during off-work hours. That effort could reduce compute costs by 65-75% in non-production environments.

Cloud-native tooling, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) Instance Scheduler, Azure Automation, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Cloud Scheduler, enables rule-based policies tied to business hours and tag attributes. Consider integrating automation into your FinOps workflow, including classification, scheduling, alerting, and reporting.

3. Strategically leverage cloud purchase discounts

Maximize savings through rate optimization, an important FinOps capability. According to the State of FinOps 2025 Report, rate optimization is the sixth top priority for FinOps practitioners.

Commitment mechanisms like reserved instances, savings plans, and committed use discounts should be managed centrally as part of your FinOps strategy. Some FinOps best practices include:

• Start small and experiment before committing big.
• Be sure to understand your contractual obligations with respect to any of your agreements. Each cloud service provider has a different approach to negotiated discounts.
• Collaborate across engineering, procurement, and finance to align contract terms like upfront payment, flexibility, region, and SKU.
• Analyze your workloads usage to identify the best approach. A very stable production workload could be more suitable for reserved instances, while other non-production workloads that fluctuate in usage may be better geared toward savings plans or SPOT instances.

Provider discounts are one way organizations can lower costs, but they’re still utilized by less than half of respondents, according to Flexera’s 2025 State of the Cloud Report.

In an ideal world, rightsizing efforts would be performed before committing to cloud purchase discounts, but in reality, constraints on engineering teams can make that difficult. Ensure clear communication between the product and engineering teams to make proactive decisions.

The road to mature FinOps practices

Many organizations today struggle to control spiraling cloud costs. These quick wins can deliver immediate relief, but sustainable cost optimization demands a more strategic approach. Focus on a cultural shift with five core principles:

1. Team collaboration (engineering, finance, procurement, product).
2. Visibility, timeliness, and accuracy of cost data.
3. Decentralized cost ownership by teams deploying resources.
4. Central enablement of tooling, policies, and governance.
5. Iterative management of costs (adjust continuously, not once a year).

In practice, use the FinOps maturity model (crawl, walk, run) for each capability — visibility, rightsizing, rate optimization, and automation — rather than forcing the “run” stage everywhere from day one.

Efficient cost optimization isn’t just cutting costs; it’s about getting maximum business value from your cloud and technology investments. SHI’s FinOps services bring expert insights into your cloud spend, usage, and architecture. From cloud spend optimization services to centralized visibility of cloud instances in SHI One, our proprietary cloud management platform, our team helps you rein in sky-high cloud costs and improve overall cloud management. Organizations can also leverage SHI’s managed services partnered with the Flexera One platform, delivering new capabilities and visibility across your cloud, AI, and hybrid environments without silos.

NEXT STEPS

For strategic guidance on triaging cloud expenditure, fixing inefficiencies, and scaling FinOps maturity, connect with one of SHI’s experts today.