Here is a number that should concern you: most small and mid-sized businesses are overspending on cloud infrastructure by 20 to 40 percent. That is not a guess — it is a pattern we see consistently across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud accounts when we run cost audits for our clients.
The frustrating part? Most of this waste is completely avoidable. It is not caused by complex architectural decisions or cutting-edge services. It is caused by five predictable patterns that show up in nearly every SMB cloud environment we review.
If your cloud bill has been climbing and you are not sure why, there is a good chance one or more of these patterns is the culprit.
1. Oversized Instances and Resources
This is the single biggest source of cloud waste, and it is also the easiest to fix. When engineers provision cloud resources, they almost always err on the side of "bigger than we need." It makes sense in the moment — nobody wants to be responsible for a performance issue because they under-provisioned a server. But that cautious approach adds up fast.
We routinely find instances running at 10 to 15 percent CPU utilization. That means you are paying for 100 percent of a resource but using only a fraction of it. A database provisioned with 64 GB of RAM that consistently uses 12 GB. A compute instance with 8 vCPUs that never exceeds 2. Application servers scaled for peak traffic that experience peak traffic for 3 hours a week.
The fix: Right-sizing is the process of matching your resource allocation to actual usage. Both AWS and Azure provide right-sizing recommendations in their cost management consoles. Review them monthly, and act on them. For most SMBs, right-sizing alone reduces cloud spend by 15 to 25 percent. The key is to make it a recurring practice, not a one-time exercise.
2. Unused Resources Nobody Turned Off
Every cloud environment accumulates digital clutter. A developer spins up a test environment on Tuesday and forgets to tear it down. Someone creates a load balancer for a project that got cancelled. Snapshots pile up from backup jobs that ran months ago. Elastic IP addresses sit unattached. Storage volumes persist after the instances they served have been terminated.
These orphaned resources are invisible in day-to-day operations, but they show up every month on your bill. We have found clients paying hundreds of dollars per month for resources that had no active connections, no traffic, and no business purpose. One client was spending over $800 per month on EBS snapshots alone — backups of servers that no longer existed.
The fix: Run a monthly audit of your cloud resources. Look for instances with zero network traffic, unattached storage volumes, unused elastic IPs, old snapshots, and idle load balancers. Both AWS Trusted Advisor and Azure Advisor flag many of these automatically. Better yet, implement tagging policies that require every resource to have an owner and an expiration date. If a resource does not have a tag, it gets flagged for review. Through our cloud platform services, we help clients set up automated waste detection that catches these issues before they accumulate.
3. No Reserved Capacity or Savings Plans
On-demand pricing is the default in every cloud provider, and it is also the most expensive option. If you are running workloads that are predictable — and most production workloads are — you are leaving significant money on the table by not committing to reserved instances or savings plans.
AWS Reserved Instances and Savings Plans offer 30 to 60 percent discounts compared to on-demand pricing, depending on the commitment term and payment option. Azure Reservations provide similar savings. Google Cloud offers Committed Use Discounts. These are not obscure features — they are core pricing mechanisms that every cloud provider offers. Yet a surprising number of SMBs are running 100 percent on-demand because no one has taken the time to analyze their usage patterns and make commitments.
The fix: Review your usage data for the past 3 to 6 months. Identify workloads that run consistently — databases, application servers, and core infrastructure are almost always candidates. Start with 1-year commitments on your most stable workloads to lock in savings with lower risk. You do not need to commit everything — even covering 60 to 70 percent of your baseline usage with reserved capacity can cut your bill by 20 percent or more.
4. Unoptimized Storage Tiers
Cloud storage is cheap, but cheap multiplied by careless adds up. Every major cloud provider offers multiple storage tiers at different price points, designed for different access patterns. The problem is that most SMBs dump everything into the default tier and never revisit the decision.
Consider a common scenario: your application generates log files that are actively used for about 7 days, occasionally referenced for 30 days, and technically "needed" for a year for compliance purposes. If all of those logs sit in S3 Standard or Azure Hot storage for the full year, you are paying premium prices for data that is accessed less than 1 percent of the time after the first week. Moving older data to infrequent access or archive tiers can reduce storage costs by 50 to 80 percent for that data.
The fix: Implement lifecycle policies that automatically transition data to cheaper storage tiers based on age and access patterns. S3 Intelligent-Tiering can automate this for AWS. Azure offers lifecycle management rules for Blob storage. Audit your storage buckets and identify data that has not been accessed in 30, 60, or 90 days — that data is almost certainly in a more expensive tier than it needs to be. Pay special attention to backups, logs, and media files, as these tend to be the largest and most neglected.
5. No Cost Monitoring or Alerts
This is not a waste pattern per se — it is the pattern that allows all the other patterns to persist. If nobody is watching your cloud spend, nobody notices when it creeps up. And in the cloud, spend always creeps up.
We regularly encounter SMBs whose cloud bill has increased 40 to 60 percent over 12 months with no corresponding increase in business value. The increases happen gradually — a few hundred dollars here, a new service there — and nobody notices until someone finally looks at the annual trend. By that point, months of waste have already accumulated.
The fix: Set up billing alerts at multiple thresholds. Start with alerts at 80 percent and 100 percent of your expected monthly spend. Add anomaly detection to catch sudden spikes. Assign a specific person to review the cloud bill every month — not just the total, but the breakdown by service, region, and team. Create a monthly "cloud cost review" that takes 30 minutes and compares current spend to the previous month and to your budget. This single practice prevents more waste than any technical optimization.
The Real Cost of Cloud Waste
Let us put this in perspective. If your monthly cloud bill is $5,000 and you are overspending by 30 percent, that is $1,500 per month — $18,000 per year — going to waste. For a $15,000 monthly bill, the waste could be $54,000 per year. That is a full-time employee's salary being spent on idle servers and oversized databases.
The compound effect is even worse. Cloud waste tends to grow over time because the same habits that created the waste continue unchecked. Without intervention, that 30 percent waste today becomes 40 percent waste next year.
How CenterMarq Approaches Cloud Cost Optimization
Our cloud platform services include a comprehensive cost audit that typically identifies 20 to 40 percent in savings opportunities. Here is our approach:
- Audit — We analyze your actual usage data across all cloud services, regions, and accounts
- Identify — We map every waste pattern and calculate the potential savings for each
- Prioritize — We rank opportunities by savings impact and implementation effort
- Implement — We execute the changes, starting with quick wins that deliver immediate savings
- Monitor — We set up ongoing cost governance to prevent waste from returning
Most clients see a positive ROI within the first month of optimization.
Stop Overpaying for Cloud
Your cloud bill should reflect the value you are getting, not the waste you have accumulated. If you have not reviewed your cloud spending in the last quarter, you are almost certainly overpaying.
Book a free consultation and we will walk through your cloud bill together. No commitment, no pressure — just a clear picture of where your money is going and how to keep more of it.