Between 21% and 32% of cloud budgets are wasted.
Harness estimates that figure at $44.5 billion globally in 2025 alone.
And yet cloud is almost universally sold as the smart financial decision.
So, what’s actually happening?
– 89% of enterprises now run multi-cloud environments.
– Average of 3.4 cloud providers per organisation.
– Only 8% are managing it with any genuine maturity.
The rest are:
– Paying for resources provisioned for a project that ended months ago.
– Running parallel environments nobody has the authority to decommission.
– Getting surprised by egress charges that weren’t in anyone’s business case.
– Watching cloud costs increase 2.5x after migration, just like GEICO did.
Cloud repatriation is now a genuine trend.
86% of CIOs plan to move at least some workloads back on-premise.
Not because cloud doesn’t work.
Because they over-migrated without understanding the economics.
37signals saved approximately $2 million per year by leaving AWS entirely.
That’s not an anti-cloud story.
It’s a workload placement story.
The smartest cloud strategies in 2026 aren’t asking ‘cloud or on-premise?’
They’re asking ‘which workloads, at which scale, at which cost, belong where?’
Meanwhile, sovereign cloud is the fastest growing segment.
European sovereign cloud spending is forecast to more than triple from £5.4 billion to £18 billion between 2025 and 2027.
Driven entirely by European governments deciding they can no longer trust where their data sits.
Before your next cloud renewal: do you actually know what you’re using, and what it’s costing you per unit of value delivered?
