Chad Timms lays out some benefits:
Flexera’s 2026 State of the Cloud Report found that estimated waste in cloud infrastructure and platform spend rose to 29% this year. That is the first increase in five years. Managing cloud costs remains the top challenge for 85% of respondents. Your database estate sits inside that cloud bill through licensing, capacity, and the people who keep it running. It is rarely examined line by line. Database cost optimization seldom fails for lack of effort. It fails because the spend gets treated as a purchasing problem when it is really an operating one.
Renewals get negotiated. Cloud service tiers get compared. Meanwhile, the decisions that actually set the number are made on the ground, often by whoever is on call that week. Below are seven questions a finance or IT leader can put to their own team, or to a provider, along with what a strong answer and a weak answer sound like.
The target of this post is more for managers versus line employees, but it’s good to think about how you would answer the questions in the post.