Why cloud expenditure is rising, and how enterprises are fighting back

Imagine signing off on a cloud budget that looks watertight, only to find months later that costs are spiralling far beyond projections. Extra storage has been quietly added, idle resources are left running, data transfers are charged by the gigabyte, and AI workloads are consuming GPUs at breakneck speed. Suddenly, innovation feels less like an advantage and more like a runaway expense.

Gartner estimates enterprises overspend by nearly 30% each year due to inefficient resource allocation, while IDC projects global cloud spends will soar past $1.3…