Most organizations are hemorrhaging money on cloud resources they don’t need. Corporations waste over $200 billion annually on unused or idle cloud resources. For 2025, enterprise cloud infrastructure waste alone is projected to reach $44.5 billion, driven by mismanaged, over-provisioned, or idle resources. And the problem isn’t getting better: 52% of engineering leaders say the disconnect between FinOps and engineering teams is actively contributing to wasted cloud spend. FinOps in Focus 2025
The data gap makes it worse. Fewer than half of organizations have access to real-time data on idle cloud resources (43%), unused or orphaned resources (39%), or over/under-provisioned workloads (33%). Most companies know they have a problem. Few have the visibility to do anything about it. FinOps in Focus 2025
Why doesn’t FinOps reduce cloud costs?
Many organizations have turned to FinOps as the logical answer to cloud cost management, only to find the results fall short of expectations. In practice, teams frequently find themselves consumed by the complexity of the tooling itself, spending more time configuring allocation models, designing tagging taxonomies, and building reporting rules than acting on the output. Meanwhile, the underlying problem continues to grow.
Do you know which spend is productive and which is waste?
The core issue is that organizations are not simply lacking data. They are failing to distinguish between cloud spend that actively drives business value and spend that has accumulated without purpose or oversight. Without clear visibility into utilization, ownership, and the intended purpose of each resource, costs go unquestioned and budgets expand. The longer that gap persists, the more pointed the question becomes: how much more will be spent before the right controls are in place to stop it?
How have successful companies rethought the approach?
Leading organizations are not waiting for end-of-month reports to tell them what went wrong. They are putting cloud management governance and controls in place that prevent unnecessary spend from occurring in the first place. Here is what that looks like in practice:
- Approved, IT-governed cloud offerings ensure resources are deployed correctly from day one, optimized to the needs of the request and brought under management to maintain compliance and prevent vulnerability at provisioning.
- Automated, well-defined subscription terms, ownership, and end dates prevent runaway spend by automatically deactivating workloads that no longer serve a business purpose.
- Automated controls and policies stop unnecessary provisioning before it happens, not after the invoice arrives.
- Automated discovery finds unknown or unmanaged resources, reduces security risk from rogue or forgotten workloads while providing centralized visibility across cloud and on-premises virtual infrastructure. Unmanaged resources are not just a financial leak, but a security risk as well.
- Day 2 actions turn insight into action. FinOps tools can flag that a VM is too big; Day 2 actions resize or hibernate that workload in the same workflow with no ticket, no second tool, no waiting for someone to act on the report. That’s the difference between knowing about waste and actually stopping it.
Cloud management is where the real work gets done
FinOps tools are useful for uncovering where money is being misspent, but a report without a clear path to action has limited value. When you can’t use spend data directly to resize resources, reassign ownership, deactivate unused workloads, or enforce provisioning policy, the findings tend to be noted and then set aside while the costs continue.
How can OpenText help with cloud management and spend?
OpenText Cloud Management™ is built around cloud management first, with cost control embedded throughout. When the system that governs your cloud resources is the same system that reports on your spend data, you can act without having to go to another tool. The result is less time spent configuring reporting tools and trying to interpret their output, and more time spent managing your cloud environment effectively.
OpenText Cloud Management also delivers cloud-spend reporting, giving IT and finance teams the visibility they need for departmental accountability and budget planning, plus the data for chargeback or showback.
