India's cloud computing market is growing at 13.35% CAGR — but most businesses are paying 30–40% more than they need to. The waste comes from three consistent sources: over-provisioned instances, unused storage, and orphaned snapshots.
The three biggest sources of cloud waste
1. Over-provisioned instances
When businesses migrate to the cloud, they typically lift-and-shift their on-premise server specs without right-sizing. A server that was running at 15% utilisation on-premise gets migrated as-is — and you pay for 100% of the capacity, 24/7. Right-sizing alone typically reduces compute costs by 20–35%.
2. Unused storage
Orphaned EBS volumes, unattached persistent disks, and forgotten backup buckets accumulate silently. Cloud storage seems cheap until you have 50TB of it and realise 20TB is data you no longer need.
3. Unmanaged development environments
Dev and staging environments that run 24/7 when they're only needed 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, waste roughly 75% of their cost. Scheduling automatic shutdowns for non-production resources is one of the fastest wins available.
Practical steps for 2026
- Run a cloud cost audit — most providers offer native tools (AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Analysis)
- Implement rightsizing recommendations from your provider's advisor tools
- Tag all resources so you can attribute costs by team or project
- Set up budget alerts so overspend doesn't go unnoticed for a month
- Consider Reserved Instances for predictable workloads (typically 30–40% cheaper than on-demand)
The businesses achieving 30–40% cloud cost reductions aren't doing anything exotic — they're just actively managing their cloud the way they'd manage any other cost centre.