The Cloud Cost Crisis: Why Optimization Is Every CIO’s Top Priority in 2025

What makes this priority so essential?

The promise of cloud computing is to speed innovation by making it easier to deploy, access and scale. But spiraling cloud costs can lead to expenses and complexity that can materially offset, if not cancel out entirely, those benefits. According to Gartner, end-user spending on public cloud services will grow by 21.4%, reaching $723.4 billion in 2025. This surge is partly attributed to escalating demand for AI resources, as organizations increasingly rely on cloud infrastructure to support AI workloads. This urgency and adoption of AI has compounded cloud cost concerns as organizations attempt to consume and analyze massive amounts of data to drive more revenue and increase end user experiences. A recent survey by Tangoe stated “The cloud’s hidden costs and unpredictable invoices can become the silent killer of GenAI.” Companies of every industry are eager to deploy AI capabilities to gain a competitive advantage, but expensive and ineffective cloud deployments will have the opposite effect.

Cloud spend is a board-level priority because it represents significant spend, cash flow, margins, cost to serve, market cap and the ability to survive an economic environment that rewards profitability. The stakes are high, and CIOs in 2025 will enjoy outsized rewards for successfully navigating these waters or will be cast aside for those who can.

What’s the best way to tackle this priority?

There are three basic approaches to optimizing cloud costs.

• First, CIOs must understand their real cloud cost and usage, and establish and track associated KPIs (surprisingly, many yet don’t). Then, they need to reduce waste by taking a complete inventory of their cloud environments and eliminate unused instances and try to reduce their data footprint. 
• Second, renegotiate contracts with cloud providers to secure a better deal for your company or prepare to switch to a more cost-effective option. The hyperscalers are aggressively looking to capture market share, and you have the upper hand in negotiations.

• Finally, simply doing a lift-and-shift move of your applications to the cloud without any modifications often results in higher costs. To benefit from the cost-saving potential of the cloud, you may think about rearchitecting your applications to make use of cloud-native features and services, but that can take significant time, developer resources and adds risk. However, there are alternative approaches that can significantly reduce cloud spend but without changes to the applications. On the compute side, looking at your Java applications and infrastructure is a good place to start, and in particular making use of a high-performance Java platform, such as Azul Platform Prime.

Mastering Java Cloud Spend with FinOps and Smart Tooling

Java remains one of the most popular and widely deployed application development languages in the market today. Right-sizing Java applications will require a mix of vendor and third-party tools. Each cloud provider offers different tools to do roughly the same thing: understand costs, billing, and how applications are running. If your task is to manage your Java cloud spend, you want to focus primarily on: 

• Compute usage, whether that is Amazon EC2 compute (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud), serverless, or managed container services.  

• Breaking down your cost and resource utilization within your Kubernetes fleet (if applicable). 

• Identifying consumption of related storage, networking, and supporting cloud services like search, analytics, etc.  

• Going beyond simple per-team cost breakdowns to establish unit metrics of costs for individual features and user tasks (like cost per customer, cost per checkout, etc.).  

A successful FinOps team will partner with DevOps and Java engineering teams to contain costs. These teams must adhere to the FinOps framework of Inform, Optimize and Operate.

• Inform. Identifying data sources for cloud cost, usage and efficiency data. Using this data for allocation, analysis and reporting empowers teams to develop capabilities in budgeting, forecasting trends, building KPIs for benchmarking and developing metrics that will reveal the business value of an organization’s cloud spend.
• Optimize. Identifying opportunities to improve cloud efficiency using the data and capabilities developed in the Inform Phase.
• Operate. Implementing organizational changes to operationalize FinOps using the data and capabilities developed in the Inform and Optimize phases.

IT Asset Managers (ITAMs) will be your trusted lieutenants in negotiating lower cloud contracts and SaaS licenses. They have experience and insider knowledge of what it’s like to deal with the biggest players in the tech landscape and how to find their weak points. They can help guide you through negotiating for the long term so cost savings can be maximized with tactics such as rolling over unspent credits into next year.

Smarter Cloud Spending Will Define IT Leadership This Year

To stay competitive in 2025, CIOs must lead with a clear and actionable cloud cost optimization strategy—one that goes beyond visibility and into measurable value. That means aligning FinOps, ITAM, DevOps, and engineering teams around shared metrics, smarter tooling, and ongoing collaboration. Whether it’s renegotiating contracts, reducing overprovisioned capacity, or optimizing Java workloads with high-performance platforms, the path forward is clear: control cloud costs or risk being controlled by them. In a year where profitability, innovation, and efficiency will separate the leaders from the rest, cost-savvy CIOs will be the ones driving sustainable, cloud-powered growth.

Cloud and engineering teams use Azul Platform Prime to reduce cloud waste and leverage committed cloud spend, all while improving carrying capacity and maintaining service levels for growing workloads.

For more information on how a high-performance Java platform can help optimize your cloud costs by 20%+, click here.