Enterprises are spending more on cloud services while affirming its strategic value
Cloud spending is up, and not by a little. Most companies are going over budget. Nearly every company surveyed by Azul (98%) believes that their cloud investments are directly linked to revenue growth. Only 71% can prove the numbers, but belief at this scale doesn’t come from guesswork. Cloud isn’t viewed as overhead; it’s infrastructure for growth.
Enterprises now treat cloud as a core strategy, something that’s enabling operational agility, faster innovation, and scalable services aligned with customer demand. That’s hard to achieve with traditional infrastructure. So yes, the price tag is growing. But smart teams aren’t just buying compute, they’re buying adaptability.
There’s always tension between cost control and innovation velocity. But cloud is no longer optional. It’s foundational. Whether you’re scaling services globally or adapting to market shifts, cloud lets you move faster and with less friction. That makes overspending a tolerable side effect, as long as the outcome justifies it.
C-suite leaders need to think of cloud spend less as an expense line, and more as a tool for operational leverage. If you’re not tying cloud to revenue, automation, or speed, you’re not using it right. Cost grows because value grows, and the market rewards that.
Azul’s CEO Scott Sellers gets this. He noted that companies are doing more in the cloud than they originally expected, not because they lack control, but because the benefits keep stacking up, flexibility, scalability, and better top-line outcomes. When platforms prove their worth, bets get bigger. And in this case, they seem to be paying off.
Cost management has overtaken security as the primary concern in enterprise cloud strategy
For years, security dominated every cloud conversation. That’s changed. Today, cost control sits at the top of the priority list for enterprises operating in the cloud. According to Flexera research, cost management became the number one cloud concern in 2023, overtaking security, and it continues to hold that position in 2024. That’s not surprising. Cloud spend is growing fast, even faster than many companies anticipated.
Executives are watching budgets more closely now. They want clarity on what they’re spending, why they’re spending it, and whether it’s generating returns. With cloud services expanding across every business unit, from ops to AI to customer platforms, that demand for financial discipline is logical. We’re talking about platforms that are essential, but not cheap.
This shift also signals a maturing market. Companies have accepted that cloud is the platform of choice, but they want more control over how it scales. Moving from cloud-first to cost-aware cloud strategy doesn’t mean slowing down, it means making smarter bets. That requires transparency, performance benchmarks, and the ability to attribute spend directly to impact.
Security hasn’t disappeared, but it no longer stands alone. It now shares the stage with cost scrutiny. For the C-suite, this means allocating resources more intelligently, balancing innovation and safeguards with spend visibility. You can’t scale value if you don’t manage spend, and the board expects both.
FinOps is reshaping cloud spending practices by linking costs directly with business outcomes
Cloud costs are no longer just an IT issue, they’re a boardroom concern. That’s why FinOps is gaining momentum. It’s not just a framework for cutting expenses. It’s a discipline designed to maximize return on investment by increasing visibility into cloud usage and tying spending to real business value.
When done right, FinOps enables teams to understand exactly what they’re paying for and why. It provides a shared language for finance, engineering, and product teams to align around metrics that matter, like productivity, speed, and impact, not just raw spend. You can’t manage what you can’t see, and FinOps delivers that visibility.
What’s interesting is that companies using FinOps effectively aren’t necessarily spending less, they’re spending smarter. As Jay Litkey, Senior Vice President of Cloud and FinOps at Flexera and a governing board member at the FinOps Foundation, said, “If you’re doing it right, you might well be increasing your cloud spend because you’re able to prove that it’s productive.” That’s a precise way of putting it. Value matters more than volume.
For C-suite leaders, the takeaway is simple: cost reduction is not the only goal. The real win is in proving that spending directly enables progress. FinOps helps justify investments to the board, supports cross-functional accountability, and ensures cloud infrastructure is delivering more than technical lift, it’s driving growth.
Rising efficiency in cloud and AI technologies drives increased consumption, reflecting Jevons paradox
The more efficient cloud platforms and AI tools become, the more companies use them. As performance improves and access becomes easier, usage increases. So even though unit costs may decrease, total spend goes up. This is exactly what we’re seeing now across cloud and AI environments.
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, referenced this earlier in the year when discussing generative AI. He pointed out that as AI becomes faster and more accessible, adoption accelerates quickly. Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul, extended the idea to cloud usage. He noted that because cloud is inherently cost-effective, it encourages organizations to run more workloads, launch more services, and do it all faster. The result is higher consumption, not lower costs.
This dynamic has major implications for leaders. You don’t cut spend simply by optimizing infrastructure, you also need to manage demand. Because when tools are more powerful and more useful, teams will use them more aggressively. That’s a rational business response, but it adds complexity to budget planning.
C-suites should be prepared for this pattern. Cost efficiency may look like it will reduce overall spend, but the real outcome is a shift in behavior: teams deploy faster, experiment more, and consume more cloud resources. That expansion can deliver big results, if tracking mechanisms, governance, and business alignment are in place. Without them, even efficient systems become financial risks.
Executive oversight of cloud budgets is intensifying amid rising investments
Cloud adoption has scaled up fast. But with scale comes executive scrutiny. More than 40% of companies surveyed by Azul reported that their CEOs have raised concerns about how quickly cloud budgets are growing. In 27% of cases, expanding the cloud footprint now requires formal board approval, tied directly to market conditions and business performance.
This is a clear signal to C-suite leaders: unchecked cloud growth is no longer acceptable. Boards want proof that spend turns into measurable value, not just infrastructure expansion. The era of passive approval is over. Every additional dollar needs to be justified with clearer metrics, cost per transaction, time-to-market acceleration, productivity impact. Without that, approvals slow down or stall.
Companies are under pressure to confirm that they’re executing a cloud strategy with financial controls, defensible ROI, and direct alignment to corporate goals. That applies whether you’re migrating applications, enhancing AI models, or scaling SaaS products. Leaders need to connect usage with business drivers.
Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul, understands this tension. He described how even within his own company, there’s ongoing friction between the engineering freedom that cloud enables and the financial accountability it demands. He called it playing “whack-a-mole” with rising costs, reactive problem solving that signals the need for better visibility and proactive cost planning.
Make data-supported planning part of every expansion proposal. Ensure budgets are tied to outcome-based metrics.
Cloud demand is surging even as organizations implement cost control measures
Cost control efforts are evolving, but they haven’t slowed down cloud usage. In fact, the trend is moving in the opposite direction. Companies are still launching new workloads, migrating more applications, and increasing their cloud footprint, despite deploying tools like FinOps and instituting stricter budget governance.
This reflects a basic shift in enterprise behavior. Cloud is no longer treated as a finite resource; it’s infrastructure for scale, speed, and continuous development. Once teams have access to that capability, they don’t slow down, they lean into it. Cost control becomes less about cutting spend and more about extracting measurable value from the spend that’s happening.
Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul, put it plainly. He described the experience of managing cloud spend at his own company as “whack-a-mole.” Costs spike unexpectedly, and engineering and operations leaders step in to address them. It’s reactive, but it’s also the reality for many companies trying to innovate quickly while keeping financial discipline intact.
What executives need to understand is this: demand isn’t driven just by availability, it’s driven by value. Teams adopt more cloud services because they see ROI in deployment speed, user experience, analytics, AI, and integration. The key to managing that demand isn’t restricting it, it’s supporting it with clear spend tracking, usage optimization, and transparency.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with growth in cloud usage, especially when it aligns with product velocity and revenue outcomes. What matters is whether that growth is being monitored, managed, and connected to strategic KPIs. That’s the leadership challenge. Not to slow teams down, but to ensure they’re building faster—and smarter.
Key highlights
- Cloud spending exceeds expectations but drives growth: Leaders should view rising cloud costs as strategic investments, with 98% of enterprises linking spend to revenue growth—even if only 71% can fully validate outcomes with data.
- Cost control now outranks security as top concern: Boards expect greater clarity around cloud spending, pushing CIOs to implement cost governance without slowing operational momentum.
- FinOps reframes spend as value, not waste: Executives should support FinOps adoption to align cross-functional teams around business outcomes, enabling smarter—not just leaner—cloud investments.
- Efficiency fuels more cloud usage, not less: As cloud tools become more accessible, expect consumption to grow; managing demand is now as important as optimizing infrastructure.
- Budget scrutiny intensifies at the top: With 40% of CEOs raising concerns and 27% requiring board approval for expansion, cloud initiatives must now show direct business value and ROI.
- Cloud usage keeps expanding despite controls: Operational teams continue to increase cloud consumption due to clear benefits; leaders must tie this growth to measurable KPIs to maintain alignment and financial discipline.
