Without collaboration and transparency, more than half of developers admit their cloud infrastructure purchasing commitments are based on guesswork
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 26, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Harness, the AI-Native Software Delivery Platform™ company, today released a new annual survey report, “FinOps in Focus 2025“. The report finds that global enterprises are set to waste billions on their cloud infrastructure spend this year, due to a failure to create a culture of cost awareness among developers.
The study of 700 engineering leaders and developers across the US and UK reveals:
- 52% of engineering leaders say the disconnect between FinOps and development teams is leading to wasted spend on cloud infrastructure costs.
- Developers have limited insight into cloud waste: Fewer than half of respondents say they have access to real-time data on idle cloud resources (43%), unused or orphaned resources (39%), and over or under-provisioned workloads (33%).
- Without a clear picture of cloud resource requirements, 55% of developers say purchasing commitments are ultimately based on guesswork.
- An estimated 21% of enterprise cloud infrastructure spend—equivalent to $44.5 billion in 2025*—is wasted on underutilized resources.
“Cloud infrastructure spend is one of the biggest line items for modern enterprises, right behind salary. Leadership teams should ask themselves if they are comfortable relying on guesswork to manage and optimize this spend,” said John Bonney, CFO at Harness. “With a lack of visibility into cloud costs and constantly shifting requirements for workloads, needless inefficiencies and over-commitments are eating up resources and holding firms back when they are under pressure to do more with less.”
By automating cloud cost management, organizations can dynamically manage spend, eliminating waste and realizing instant savings. This intelligent approach also removes the burden of managing resource scheduling for engineers while avoiding unnecessary resource usage.
Enterprises Must ‘Shift Left’ on Cloud Cost Management
The study finds that organizations lack transparency when sharing cloud spend data. Developers are often involved in cost optimization too late in the process, and are not given the insights they need to optimize cloud spend:
- Most organizations are failing to set up fundamental cloud cost optimization best practices: 71% of developers do not carry out spot orchestration, 61% do not rightsize instances, 58% do not use reserved instances or savings plans, and 48% do not track and shut down idle resources.
- 62% of developers want more control over, and responsibility for, managing cloud infrastructure costs.
- Only 32% of developers have fully automated practices to enforce cost savings (e.g. shutting down idle resources or rightsizing).
Without sufficient use of automation or AI across the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), enterprises take an average of 31 days to identify and eliminate cloud waste, such as idle, orphaned, or unused resources. Similarly, it takes about 25 days to detect and rightsize overprovisioned cloud resources. Change is on the horizon: 86% of developers believe AI will enhance their ability to optimize costs within the next year.
“The reality is developers do not often view cost optimization as a priority. This disconnect leads to overprovisioned resources, idle instances, and inefficient architectures that quietly drain budgets,” explains Ravi Yadalam, Senior Director of Product Management at Harness. “Cloud efficiency isn’t just a numbers game—it’s about creating a culture of cost awareness where enterprises shift their FinOps practices left, helping engineers understand how their architectural choices directly impact both performance and financial outcomes. Developers must become equal partners in their cloud cost management strategy, gaining full visibility into spend before deployment to identify cloud waste and automatically eliminate it.”
The complete “FinOps in Focus 2025” report can be found here: https://www.harness.io/finops-in-focus
*The average potential savings on Cloud System Infrastructure Spend was calculated as 21% of $211,856,000,000.00, using Gartner’s worldwide public cloud end user spending forecast for 2025.
About the research
This study is based on a survey of 700 developers and engineering leaders in the United States and the United Kingdom at organizations with more than 1,000 employees. It was conducted by market research firm Coleman Parkes between November and December 2024.
Of the 700 developers and engineering leaders surveyed, 350 were developers, and 350 were engineering leaders. 500 individuals surveyed were in the United States, and 200 were in the United Kingdom.
About Harness
Harness is the leading AI-native platform for complete software delivery. It provides a simple, safe, and secure way for engineering and DevOps teams to release applications into production. Harness uses AI and machine learning to monitor the quality of deployments and automatically roll back failed ones, saving time and reducing the need for custom scripting and manual oversight, giving engineers their nights and weekends back. Harness customers accelerate deployments by up to 75%, reduce infrastructure costs by up to 60%, and decrease lead time for changes by up to 90%. Harness is based in San Francisco.
SOURCE Harness