Cloud Cost Optimization: Why the Market Split When Waste Came Back
Estimated wasted cloud spend rose in 2026 for the first time in five years. Flexera’s 2026 State of the Cloud Report, based on 753 cloud decision-makers, puts that waste at 29% of spend, even as more organizations staff FinOps teams and talk about business value rather than discounts.
That combination is the story. The discipline got more serious. The bill got harder to hold still.
What changed
Cloud cost optimization used to mean a monthly export, a tagging campaign, and a reserved-instance purchase. That was a reasonable response when most of the money sat in a handful of virtual machines on one provider, owned by a central infrastructure team.
Two things broke that model at the same time.
First, the unit of spend stopped being the instance. Kubernetes shared a node across teams. Serverless hid the machine. Data platforms billed on consumption that did not map to a cost center....
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