What does the cloud actually cost this month? Ask finance, ask the DevOps lead, ask the admin who provisioned half the instances two years ago – chances are good all three give a different number. That gap is not a rounding error. It is, according to Flexera's 2026 State of the Cloud Report, roughly 29 percent of total cloud spend disappearing into overprovisioned resources, idle compute, and services nobody remembers switching on.