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IT Leaders Struggle to Demonstrate Cloud ROI

While the FinOps discipline is robust and proven, executives appear to be overconfident, according to Performance vs. Perception: The FinOps Execution Gap, a new report from CloudBolt Software

Many label their FinOps practices as mature and automated, which stands in stark contrast with the reality:

  • 78% of respondents admit difficulty in consistently demonstrating cloud ROI, which they defined primarily as revenue growth (43%), followed by operational efficiency/productivity (36%), and then cost savings (35%).
  • 98% agree that Kubernetes is becoming a major driver of cloud spend, but 91% remain unable to effectively optimize their Kubernetes clusters, signaling a critical blind spot as container adoption grows.
  • 66% report mostly to fully automated environments for cloud waste management and cloud spend optimization. Yet 58% of respondents say it takes weeks or months to detect and fully remediate cloud-cost waste opportunities. This calls into question the assertion of a truly automated approach for the majority of respondents.

"FinOps as a discipline is more sound than ever and continues to evolve effectively," says Kyle Campos, CTPO at CloudBolt. "But a good percentage of organizations may be taking a victory lap before even navigating the first turn. Through this research, it's evident that while a majority indicate they believe they've achieved FinOps maturity, the data shows they are still in the early stages of operationalizing and optimizing FinOps practices. Confidence in lieu of measurable progress obscures reality and hinders the improvement necessary for significant business impact."

The report details key barriers to stronger ROI on cloud investments, with:

  • 55% of respondents citing difficulty linking cloud spend directly to business outcomes.
  • 48% blaming organizational misalignment and operational silos.
  • 44% noting inefficient resource management, including poor tagging and inconsistent accountability.

Further, the report identifies private cloud/data centers as playing a key role in the ROI equation:

  • Hybrid multi-cloud management was identified as the top priority by 42% of respondents.
  • 39% say hybrid cloud management will be a "funded priority" for their organization over the next 6-12 months, only topped by AI/ML cloud-cost optimization (FinOps for AI) at 40%.

"Leaders believe they have visibility into their cloud spend. Yet without necessary governance, enforcement, and effective remediation, they are doing little to reduce the insight-to-action gap — the time it takes to go from 'we have a problem' to 'problem fixed and cost optimized.' This leads to persistent inefficiencies and inflated costs," Campos adds. "Kubernetes and AI-driven workloads especially highlight this disconnect — rapid adoption without proper operational control and automated actions (both retrospective and proactive) is dramatically affecting return on investment. If FinOps practices are not focusing on continuous optimization and employing the capabilities to execute on that, organizations will continue to struggle to effectively show cloud ROI."

Methodology: Conducted in collaboration with Wakefield Research, the study surveyed 350 senior IT leaders in the US across a wide range of industries to assess the current state of FinOps practices.

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IT Leaders Struggle to Demonstrate Cloud ROI

While the FinOps discipline is robust and proven, executives appear to be overconfident, according to Performance vs. Perception: The FinOps Execution Gap, a new report from CloudBolt Software

Many label their FinOps practices as mature and automated, which stands in stark contrast with the reality:

  • 78% of respondents admit difficulty in consistently demonstrating cloud ROI, which they defined primarily as revenue growth (43%), followed by operational efficiency/productivity (36%), and then cost savings (35%).
  • 98% agree that Kubernetes is becoming a major driver of cloud spend, but 91% remain unable to effectively optimize their Kubernetes clusters, signaling a critical blind spot as container adoption grows.
  • 66% report mostly to fully automated environments for cloud waste management and cloud spend optimization. Yet 58% of respondents say it takes weeks or months to detect and fully remediate cloud-cost waste opportunities. This calls into question the assertion of a truly automated approach for the majority of respondents.

"FinOps as a discipline is more sound than ever and continues to evolve effectively," says Kyle Campos, CTPO at CloudBolt. "But a good percentage of organizations may be taking a victory lap before even navigating the first turn. Through this research, it's evident that while a majority indicate they believe they've achieved FinOps maturity, the data shows they are still in the early stages of operationalizing and optimizing FinOps practices. Confidence in lieu of measurable progress obscures reality and hinders the improvement necessary for significant business impact."

The report details key barriers to stronger ROI on cloud investments, with:

  • 55% of respondents citing difficulty linking cloud spend directly to business outcomes.
  • 48% blaming organizational misalignment and operational silos.
  • 44% noting inefficient resource management, including poor tagging and inconsistent accountability.

Further, the report identifies private cloud/data centers as playing a key role in the ROI equation:

  • Hybrid multi-cloud management was identified as the top priority by 42% of respondents.
  • 39% say hybrid cloud management will be a "funded priority" for their organization over the next 6-12 months, only topped by AI/ML cloud-cost optimization (FinOps for AI) at 40%.

"Leaders believe they have visibility into their cloud spend. Yet without necessary governance, enforcement, and effective remediation, they are doing little to reduce the insight-to-action gap — the time it takes to go from 'we have a problem' to 'problem fixed and cost optimized.' This leads to persistent inefficiencies and inflated costs," Campos adds. "Kubernetes and AI-driven workloads especially highlight this disconnect — rapid adoption without proper operational control and automated actions (both retrospective and proactive) is dramatically affecting return on investment. If FinOps practices are not focusing on continuous optimization and employing the capabilities to execute on that, organizations will continue to struggle to effectively show cloud ROI."

Methodology: Conducted in collaboration with Wakefield Research, the study surveyed 350 senior IT leaders in the US across a wide range of industries to assess the current state of FinOps practices.

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The Latest

AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...

In 2026, the cost of downtime or an outage is no longer just a technical inconvenience; it's a $600 billion wake up call for global businesses. As our digital ecosystems become  more interconnected, each touchpoint introduces new risks and multiplies the consequences when things go wrong. And the data is clear: aggregate downtime costs  for Global 2,000 companies have surged 50% since 2024, reaching a staggering $600 billion ...

Deloitte found that 74% of enterprises expect to deploy agentic AI solutions in the next 24 months. However, the rush to deployment is outpacing foundational work, though. Only 21% of enterprises have fully formed agent governance models in place. The result? AI agents deployed without guidance or governance begin to function as fragmented islands of complexity ...

Cloud spending is no longer viewed as a passthrough IT expense, but as a strategic financial lever that directly impacts innovation capacity, profitability and enterprise resilience, according to the CFO Cloud Cost Optimization Report from Azul ...

As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption. What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents? ...

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...