The shock of your cloud invoice
The cloud promised flexibility, but mostly delivers surprises I speak weekly with people frustrated about their Azure costs and eager…
Waste is bookkeeping, not strategy
The word “waste” suggests someone didn’t keep their Azure environment tidy. That things were done sloppily. In reality, it’s often the exact opposite.
Overprovisioning? I did that myself for years with clients, deliberately, to guarantee performance. Idle capacity? That’s standing ready for scalability, or for a project going live next month. Redundancy? A deliberate architecture choice for availability and compliance. What looks like waste on a spreadsheet is often, technically, built-in certainty.
The cloud isn’t a data center you build once and then depreciate. It’s a variable OPEX model, constantly in motion. And that very flexibility means costs are never going to look fully “tidy.” But the moment finance looks at the invoice, flexibility suddenly reads as inefficiency. And that’s where the waste conversation starts.
We measure cost, but not value
What we rarely do is ask what the cloud actually gets us. Faster time-to-market. Higher deployment frequency. Less downtime. The ability to experiment and fail fast without it costing a fortune. Those aren’t details, they’re strategic advantages that feed straight into competitiveness.
I saw it up close at Microsoft: teams delivering in weeks what used to take months, because of the cloud. Nobody calculated what that was worth. Everybody calculated what it cost. Cutting costs without a value model is a defensive strategy. And optimizing defensively leads to endless arguments about euros, when the conversation should really be about growth.
Why isn’t there a standard ROI for cloud?
A classic ROI calculation is simple: return minus investment, divided by investment. But what is “the investment” in cloud? It changes every day. And what’s the return? Often indirect.
What’s the ROI of a 30% faster release cycle? Of preventing one major outage? Of experiments that fail but speed up innovation anyway? Cloud rarely replaces “the same thing, but cheaper.” Cloud makes “new and faster” possible. And that’s hard to capture in a single percentage.
On top of that, every organization optimizes for something different. A SaaS scale-up optimizes for speed. A bank optimizes for compliance. An e-commerce company optimizes for elasticity. A government body optimizes for budget control. One universal ROI formula would do reality a disservice.
From waste to value
Maybe we need to shift the conversation. Not starting from “waste,” but from value. Not from cost, but from return. Call it Return on Cloud Investment, or ROCI.
Not a single simple percentage, but a broader view. What’s our cost per transaction? What does a deployment cost? What are our cloud costs per customer? How do performance, reliability, and speed stack up against what we’re spending? Those are questions I can actually answer as an engineer and they’re the ones that match what the business actually needs.
In practice, we see that organizations who shift from “where’s the waste?” to “what’s the value per workload?” start steering fundamentally differently. The cloud stops being a cost item and becomes a growth engine again. Exactly as it was meant to be.
Optimizing is still necessary — just with a different intent
Yes, right-sizing, reserved instances, and lifecycle management still matter. That’s good craftsmanship, and it saves money. But the difference lies in what you’re doing it for.
Are you optimizing to reduce waste? Or are you optimizing to get more return out of your investment? The first is tidying up. The second is steering.
FinOps isn’t a trick for squeezing costs down. It’s a way of working where technology, process, and people collaborate to maximize the value of cloud investments. That takes collaboration between IT and finance. Steering on data and on strategy, together. That’s exactly why we believe in FinOps as a culture. Not a report. Not a dashboard. A way of working.
Cleaning up waste is step one. Maximizing value is step two. And honestly? That second conversation is a lot more interesting. So maybe it’s time we stopped talking about garbage and started talking about return, something the average cloud engineer isn’t thinking about day to day, but where those very engineers can bring genuinely valuable insight to the rest of the organization.
Want to know your ROCI?
We’d love to talk it through with you. Not about garbage, about return. Within 30 days, you’ll know where you stand. Within 31 days, you’ll see the difference.
