Why is my cloud bill so high?

What are the usual culprits?

• Idle and orphaned resources — instances and clusters left running long after their job is done.
• Oversized compute — capacity sized for a worst-case day that never came.
• Storage that grows without review, snapshots nobody deletes, and old volumes.
• Data egress and network transfer you're paying for twice.
• Pricing you've outgrown — on-demand when you could use reserved capacity or savings plans for the steady-state base.
• Growth without governance — teams spinning things up with no budget owner or review.

How a two-week audit actually works

It starts with an inventory of what's running and who owns it. Then we rank findings by dollar impact, fix the safe ones (with you), and hand the platform team a target — so there's a number the work is held against. The result is a prioritized list with figures, not a slide deck.

What keeps it from creeping back

• A budget owner and a simple showback/chargeback so cost is visible per team.
• Guardrails: tagging, quotas, and lifecycle policies.
• A monthly or quarterly review rhythm.

Bottom line: most spend problems are a handful of specific items, not a mystery. A focused audit finds them with numbers attached.