The Waste Came Back
For five straight years, organizations got better at controlling cloud waste. That trend just reversed. The Flexera 2026 State of the Cloud Report puts estimated wasted cloud spend back up at 29%, driven by AI workloads, sprawling multi-cloud environments, and platform services that are easier to turn on than to account for.
For a private company, that waste is a margin problem. For a public agency, it's something heavier. Cloud infrastructure has grown into one of the largest line items you manage, and unlike most line items, it's consumed by dozens of teams making independent decisions every day, with the bill arriving a month later. That's taxpayer money, and it's spent under a level of audit scrutiny no private CFO ever faces.
The pressure isn't a secret to the people living it. In the same Flexera research, managing cloud spend ranked as the number one challenge for the fourth year running, ahead of security. The hard part isn't knowing that cloud costs are a problem. It's that knowing hasn't been enough to fix it.
A dashboard tells you you're bleeding. It doesn't apply pressure.
The usual response to a rising cloud bill is to buy better reporting. More dashboards, more tagging, more granular breakdowns of where the money went. Useful work, and worth doing. But notice what it doesn't do: it doesn't change a single decision made by the engineer who spins up the oversized instance, or the team that forgets to turn off the test environment, or the program that commits to on-demand pricing when a discount was right there.
What closes it is accountability: connecting the people who make infrastructure decisions to the financial consequences of those decisions, continuously, as part of how work actually gets done. That's what we mean by managed FinOps. Not a report you receive. A discipline we operate on your behalf.
Here's the proof that visibility alone has hit its ceiling. Per Flexera's 2026 research, 63% of organizations now have a dedicated FinOps team, up from 51% in 2024. More teams, more tooling, more attention than ever. And cloud cost is still the top challenge.
Good cost decisions start with a clear picture of your cloud infrastructure. The first step is understanding exactly where your cloud dollars go and what it would take to govern them. The direction you take from there is yours to set.
Start With an Assessment
A Cloud Financial Management Assessment is the low-commitment first step. We establish where your spend actually goes, where the recoverable waste is, and what governing it properly would take. You walk away with a baseline and a prioritized roadmap, whether or not you do anything else with us.
Grow Into Managed FinOps
The assessment shows you the destination. Managed FinOps is how you get there and stay there: ongoing, operated cost accountability rather than a one-time cleanup that quietly unravels the moment attention moves on.
What Managed FinOps Looks Like
The FinOps discipline runs in three continuous phases. Most organizations get stuck in the first one, but the value lives in the third phase.
Phase 1 — Inform
Full visibility into where the money goes: allocation models, tagging, and reporting that works across a multi-cloud environment. This is table stakes, and it's where most efforts stop.
Phase 2 — Optimize
Continuously improving efficiency: rightsizing resources, and actively managing commitments, reserved instances, and savings plans. One concrete example of the opportunity here: per Flexera 2026, fewer than half of organizations use even a single commitment discount per cloud provider. That's recoverable money sitting in plain sight, and managing it is ongoing work, not a one-time switch.
Phase 3 — Operate
Institutionalizing accountability: budgeting, engineering ownership of cost outcomes, and governance for AI infrastructure. This is the phase that turns cost control from a periodic project into a permanent operating model, and it's the phase most organizations never reach on their own.
What the Assessment Actually Gives You
The Cloud Financial Management Assessment is built to deliver something useful on its own, not to function as a long sales pitch.
What we examine:
- Where your cloud and SaaS spend is actually going, across providers
- Where the recoverable waste is, and what it's costing you now
- How your commitments and discounts compare to what your usage warrants
- Where cost decisions are being made without financial accountability attached
What you walk away with:
- A clear spend baseline across your environment
- A prioritized roadmap of savings opportunities, ranked by effort and impact
- A straight answer on what governing this properly would take
AI Spend is the Latest Cost Culprit
Just as organizations are getting a handle on traditional cloud cost, a new category is arriving that doesn't play by the same rules. GPU-accelerated compute, large-scale data pipelines, and model training and inference don't behave like ordinary application workloads. The costs are higher, the consumption patterns are far less predictable, and the business case is harder to model up front.
The data already shows the strain: in Flexera's 2026 research, unpredictable, bursty AI workloads rank as the top challenge in managing costs. For agencies standing up AI programs under public scrutiny, that unpredictability can turn into a governance and accountability question that will get asked out loud.
For the Conversation You Need to Have With Leadership
We put together a short executive brief, Cloud Spending Is a Leadership Problem Now, that makes this case at the altitude where the decision actually gets made. It reframes cloud cost from a technical line item into a leadership and governance issue, with the data to back it up, in a format you can hand directly to a CFO, COO, or agency director.
It's free, and there's no form to fill out. If you've been trying to get your leadership to take cloud cost seriously, this is the document to forward.
FAQ's
The questions agencies actually ask
How would we even contract this?
Through channels you likely already use. We hold positions on NASA SEWP V, ITES-4H, NASPO ValuePoint, and GSA MAS, covering federal, defense, and state-and-local buyers. Whatever kind of agency you are, there's a path that doesn't require standing up a new procurement from scratch.
We already have a cloud cost tool. Why would we need this?
Because a tool reports; it doesn't govern. Most agencies that have a dashboard still have the cost problem (see above on the 63% of organizations with FinOps teams that still rank cost as their top challenge). The value we add isn't more visibility. It's operating the accountability that visibility alone never delivers.
Is our data secure, and how is it handled?
Yes. We're CMMC Level 2 certified, meeting the Department of Defense standard for protecting controlled unclassified information. Just as important: your data stays yours. It always resides with you, and you retain full sovereignty over it throughout the engagement. We operate the cost governance discipline around your environment — we don't take custody of your data to do it.
Are we locking ourselves into a long engagement?
No. The assessment stands on its own and obligates you to nothing further. Managed FinOps continues only as long as it's delivering value you can see.
Start With a Conversation
You don't have to commit to governing your entire cloud estate to find out what it's costing you. Start with a consultation, or start with an assessment, and get a clear picture of where your public dollars are going and what it would take to control them.
