How CIOs Are Keeping Cloud Bills and IT Budgets Under Control
Analytics Insight, Wednesday, October 14th, 2026
CIOs are curbing rising cloud waste with cost owners, real-time visibility, smarter purchasing and AI spending limits.
Gartner forecasts $6.37 trillion in IT spending in 2026, while Flexera reports that 29% of cloud spend is wasted, up from 27%, along with a 17% overspend against budgets, so CIOs are tightening control.
Generative AI services and fast-moving GPU environments make forecasting harder.
Common tactics include naming an owner for every account and workload, tagging resources to business units, holding monthly finance and engineering reviews, using multi-cloud dashboards that expose idle resources, commitment-based purchasing and spending limits on AI usage.
Flexera also finds that 71% of organizations run a cloud center of excellence and 63% have a FinOps team.