ProsperOps commissioned 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, to examine how FinOps teams are managing costs as cloud environments become more complex and resource-constrained. The survey, conducted by 451 Research, with over 500 FinOps practitioners across North America, Latin America, and Europe, provides insights into current cloud priorities, the state of FinOps automation, and where teams continue to face challenges optimizing cloud spend.
TL;DR
- Cloud waste remains high: Despite cost reduction being a top FinOps priority, 24% of cloud spend is still wasted. Practitioners cite lack of visibility into cloud spending, FinOps skills gap, and difficulty manually managing commitments as the top challenges contributing to waste.
- Multicloud complexity: With an average of 2.4 clouds in use per organization, teams struggle to manage costs efficiently across multiple providers.
- Workload optimization dominates today, but rate optimization is underleveraged. Despite rate optimization delivering greater savings—up to 50% to 60% on compute resources without requiring architecture or configuration changes.
- Most FinOps processes still rely on human-mediated automation, limiting the full potential of automation for cloud cost optimization.
In this blog, we analyze findings from the survey—why cloud waste persists, how commitment discounts remain underutilized, and why automation is essential for proactive cost management.
Cloud Waste is Still a Significant Problem
Cloud waste may have dipped from the often-cited 35% to around 24%, but the scale is still staggering. That means nearly one in every four dollars spent on cloud is going to waste.
What’s more interesting is why that waste persists. The survey makes it clear: respondents cited lack of visibility into cloud spending (54%), followed by FinOps skills gap (44%) and difficulty manually managing commitments for dynamic usage patterns (40%). Lack of accountability for cloud spending (38%) and organizational silos (33%) are also common obstacles.
This highlights a fundamental tension. As cloud estates grow more complex, FinOps responsibilities expand faster than teams can scale.
Multi-cloud Adoption is Now Standard, Adding Complexity
Multi-cloud adoption has become standard for many organizations. On average, survey respondents reported using 2.4 cloud providers, with some leveraging even more to access best-of-breed services. Organizations are drawn to multiple clouds for flexibility, redundancy, and access to specialized capabilities, but this approach brings significant operational challenges.
Each cloud provider has its own services, pricing models, algorithms, and offerings. Managing these differences requires specialized expertise, careful planning, and ongoing monitoring. Smaller FinOps teams or those already stretched thin may not have the bandwidth to optimize costs across multiple clouds effectively.
The result is that multi-cloud environments amplify the resource challenges highlighted earlier. Teams must reconcile different billing systems, track varied commitment discounts, and ensure policies are enforced consistently across providers. Without automation and well-structured processes, the complexity quickly becomes a barrier to cost efficiency.
Organizations Prioritize Workload Optimization Over Rate Optimization
FinOps teams continue to focus more on workload optimization than rate optimization. Usage-focused activities, such as rightsizing, alerting, resource scheduling, and cost anomaly detection, dominate the top of practitioners’ techniques to optimize cloud cost. Commitment management, on the other hand, ranks lower in comparison, even though it can deliver substantial savings without any changes to application architecture.
The preference for workload optimization reflects the complexity and risks associated with changing actual resource usage. It requires careful coordination between engineering and finance teams to ensure performance and reliability are not impacted.
This relatively low priority of commitment discounts points to a missed opportunity. Commitment plans from major cloud providers can offer substantial savings without any changes to the underlying resources. However, these plans vary and often involve a one- or three-year term with restrictions on the types of resources covered. As such, manually optimizing commitments for savings is complex and labor-intensive, especially if usage is dynamic.
The Automation Opportunity in FinOps
The research shows that automation adoption varies widely across FinOps tasks. Organizations are still heavily reliant on human decision-making for most FinOps activities— except in areas like resource scheduling and autoscaling, where automation is more widely adopted.
Only 39% of respondents have fully automated rate optimization—a complex but high-potential area for automation. Commitment discounts involve multiple variables, from resource types and term lengths to forecasted usage patterns. Managing them manually is challenging and requires deep expertise, which explains why many organizations have yet to fully automate this process. However, with sophisticated platforms, these discounts can be managed autonomously, applying expert strategies at scale and reducing both overhead and missed savings opportunities.
The takeaway is clear: automation is no longer optional. Teams that offload repeatable tasks and embrace autonomous workflows can achieve better efficiency, higher savings, and allow human expertise to focus where it matters most.
Final Thoughts
FinOps teams face growing complexity, stretched resources, and competing priorities. Workload optimization will remain critical, but fully leveraging commitment discounts through automation is the key to scaling cost efficiency.
Read the full report from 451 Research for a deeper look at the data and insights. Download here!
