Cloud spending keeps climbing, but companies still waste roughly a third of their infrastructure spend on capacity they provision and never fully use. That gap between what they buy and what they actually use is the throughline of this page. It matters most in the database layer, where workloads are expensive, performance-sensitive, and hard to size correctly. These are the cloud computing statistics that explain it in 2026, each one current and traced to a primary source, refreshed every quarter.
The most-cited numbers, at a glance:
- Worldwide public cloud spending will pass $1 trillion in 2026. (IDC, Mar 2026)
- An estimated $122 billion of IaaS and PaaS spend was wasted in 2025. (Red9 analysis of Gartner and Flexera data)
- Cloud waste rose for the first time in five years, to 29% of IaaS and PaaS spend. (Flexera, Mar 2026)
- Managing cloud spend (85%) overtook security (82%) as the top cloud challenge. (Flexera, Mar 2026)
- Cloud is now 64% of the entire database market. (Gartner, May 2025)
- 54% of all data stored in the cloud is sensitive, up from 47% a year earlier. (Thales, Jun 2025)
Cloud Spending Keeps Climbing
Cloud is now one of the largest items in most IT budgets, and the amount companies spend on it keeps rising by more than 20% a year.
Public cloud spending is set to pass $1 trillion in 2026. (IDC)
IDC projects worldwide public cloud spending to surpass $1 trillion in 2026, growing more than 21% year over year and doubling again by 2029, with PaaS the fastest-growing category at 37%. A market this size still growing better than 20% a year is not leveling off; it keeps compounding year over year.
It reached an estimated $723 billion in 2025, up 21.5%. (Gartner)
Public cloud spending hit roughly $723 billion in 2025, up 21.5% from $595.7 billion the year before. That is the most recent full-year total, and it is the base the rest of this page measures against.
SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS split roughly $300B / $212B / $209B. (Gartner)
Of the 2025 total, SaaS was the largest slice at $299.1 billion, with IaaS at $211.85 billion and PaaS at $208.64 billion. IaaS and PaaS are the layers where companies provision raw compute and storage, which is the spend most prone to over-buying, and managed databases sit inside that PaaS figure.
Public cloud spending keeps climbing
Cloud infrastructure revenue is running above $500 billion a year. (Synergy Research)
Cloud infrastructure services generated $128.6 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone, up 35% year over year, with trailing-twelve-month revenue of $455 billion and an annualized run rate now above half a trillion dollars. Provider revenue confirms the same pattern from the supply side: cloud infrastructure is still growing quickly.
AWS, Microsoft, and Google control about 63% of the market. (Synergy Research)
In the first quarter of 2026, AWS held 28% of the cloud infrastructure services market, Microsoft 21%, and Google 14%, which puts the top three at roughly 63%. Because the market is that concentrated, a handful of pricing models govern what most companies pay.
AWS, Microsoft and Google hold most of the market
Cloud Estates Are Getting More Distributed
Most companies now run across more than one cloud. The more places their workloads and data live, the harder the total bill is to keep track of.
73% of organizations now run a hybrid cloud. (Flexera)
73% of organizations operated a hybrid cloud estate in 2026, up three points from 70% the year before. Hybrid has become the standard setup for most organizations, and the more environments a company spans, the harder its total bill is to see in one place.
54% of enterprise workloads already run in public cloud. (Flexera)
Enterprise public-cloud workloads rose from 52% to 54% year over year, and the share of enterprise data in public cloud rose with it. Once more than half of production workloads run in the cloud, cloud cost becomes one of the biggest items in the IT budget rather than a side expense.
76% of large enterprises spend more than $5 million a month on cloud. (Flexera)
76% of large enterprises now spend over $5 million per month on public cloud. At that scale, even a few percentage points of overspend can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, and millions over a year.
27% of organizations plan to increase their cloud spend this year. (Flexera)
More than a quarter of organizations expect their public cloud bill to grow this year, even as managing that spend ranks as their hardest cloud problem. Budgets keep rising faster than the discipline to control them.
"Your AWS bill is a function of how many engineers you have, not how many customers you have."
With spend split across that many environments, most organizations cannot see their full cloud bill in one place.
Roughly a Third of That Spend Is Wasted
Not all of that spending does useful work. A large share of it pays for capacity that companies provision and then never use.
You will see this wasted figure reported as $180 billion or more. Those numbers apply the waste rate to total cloud spending including SaaS, which Flexera measures separately. Scope-matched to what Flexera actually surveyed, IaaS and PaaS only, it is about $122 billion (a stricter base puts the floor near $90 billion). Treat it as a directional estimate rather than an audited loss.
About a third of the IaaS + PaaS market was wasted
Cloud waste is rising again, the first increase in five years. (Flexera)
Flexera's 2026 survey put estimated wasted cloud spend on IaaS and PaaS at 29%, ending five straight years of decline. After years of companies getting better at cost control, the waste rate went back up, and Flexera attributes the change to AI cost complexity, new pricing models, and underused commitment discounts.
"AI, rather than initially helping, is actually starting to negatively impact cloud bills for large spenders and is directly impacting margins due to increased spending in the cloud."
Managing cloud spend remains the #1 cloud challenge, four years running. (Flexera)
For the fourth year in a row, managing cloud spend (85%) ranked as the number one cloud challenge, ahead of security (82%) and managing software licenses (78%). That order is a reversal from a few years ago, when security led, and cost is now the top cloud problem IT leaders report.
Cost has overtaken security as the #1 cloud challenge
91% of organizations report wasting cloud money, mostly to over-provisioning. (HashiCorp)
In HashiCorp's 2024 survey, 91% of organizations reported wasted cloud spend, and they named over-provisioning (40%) and idle or underused resources (35%) among the top causes. Those two causes are the mechanism behind the headline waste rate: capacity bought for a peak that rarely arrives, then left running. Right-sizing is how that money comes back, which is the work we do when we size cloud databases to avoid overspending.
Only 17% of organizations went over budget, which suggests the waste is structural. (Flexera)
Only 17% of organizations exceeded their public-cloud budget in the past year, yet the waste rate still rose. So the problem is not mainly overspending against plan; the plans themselves bake in capacity that never gets used.
This is a provisioning problem more than an overspending one: the capacity gets bought up front and then sits idle.
Cloud Sprawl Is Also a Security Problem
Cloud sprawl creates a security problem on top of the cost problem. As data spreads across more environments, more of it ends up exposed, and a growing share of it is sensitive.
54% of all cloud-stored data is now sensitive. (Thales)
54% of the data organizations keep in the cloud is now classified as sensitive, up from 47% a year earlier. The data companies keep in the cloud is increasingly the data that matters most, which raises the stakes on the next two numbers.
Only 8% of organizations encrypt most of their cloud data. (Thales)
Only 8% of organizations encrypt 80% or more of their cloud data. The gap between how much cloud data is sensitive and how little of it is encrypted is the exposure.
47% of sensitive cloud data is left unencrypted. (Thales)
Thales's 2026 Data Threat Report found 47% of sensitive cloud data is still unencrypted. Nearly half of the data that would do the most damage in a breach has no encryption protecting it.
A breach across multiple environments costs $5.05 million. (IBM)
The global average data-breach cost fell to $4.44 million in 2025, but breaches involving data spread across multiple environments cost $5.05 million, the most expensive type, and took 276 days to contain. That same multi-environment sprawl is also the setup that makes breaches most expensive.
The data piling up in the cloud is increasingly sensitive, and much of it is unencrypted, so the cost of mishandling it keeps climbing.
The Waste Concentrates in the Database Layer
For database teams, this is where the cloud-cost problem gets most expensive. Databases are performance-sensitive, the fastest-growing slice of cloud spend, and among the hardest workloads to size correctly.
Cloud now makes up 64% of the entire database market. (Gartner)
Cloud spending accounted for 64% of the worldwide DBMS market in 2024, against 36% on-premises. Most database spending is now cloud spending, so the waste patterns that apply to cloud in general apply to the database estate too. We cover the data side of this in our big data statistics.
The database market hit $119.7 billion and is on track for $161 billion in 2026. (Gartner)
The DBMS market reached $119.7 billion in 2024, up 13.4%, and Gartner forecasts it growing 18.4% to $161 billion in 2026. Databases are one of cloud's largest and fastest-growing categories, which makes their waste a large number even when no one reports it directly.
Cloud now makes up 64% of the database market
Many managed databases sit in PaaS, the fastest-growing and most over-provisioned layer. (IDC) (Gartner)
Managed databases fall inside Gartner's PaaS segment, about half of the $420.5 billion IaaS-plus-PaaS pool, and PaaS is the fastest-growing cloud category at 37% a year. Databases are also among the easiest workloads to over-provision: teams size for peak memory and pay for idle compute, and memory-optimized instances are easy to over-size, sitting at low utilization while billed for full capacity. The fastest-growing layer is also the hardest to right-size, which is why so much of the wasted spend ends up here. For how this changes the work of database teams, see why AI won't replace your senior DBAs.
"The cloud is often just as complicated as running things yourself, and it's usually ridiculously more expensive. The benefits have been vastly overstated."
As a real-world example, after 37signals (maker of Basecamp and HEY) moved its apps off the cloud back onto its own hardware, its annual cloud bill fell from $3.2 million to about $1.3 million, a saving of roughly $2 million a year. Most companies will keep their workloads in the cloud; the practical lesson is to size that capacity deliberately, the database layer most of all.
For a company running databases in the cloud, right-sizing them is the single biggest lever on the cloud bill.
Key Takeaways
- Cloud spending is still growing fast. It passes $1 trillion in 2026 and keeps climbing by more than 20% a year.
- Roughly a third of infrastructure spend is wasted, and it is rising again. An estimated $122 billion of IaaS and PaaS spend was wasted in 2025 at a 29% waste rate.
- Cost has overtaken security as the top cloud challenge for four years running.
- The waste concentrates in the database layer, now 64% cloud and the fastest-growing, hardest-to-size category in the platform tier.
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References
11 sources, every stat above links here
- 1. IDC — Worldwide Public Cloud Services Spending Forecast (press release, Mar 2026) idc.com ↗
- 2. Gartner — Forecast: Worldwide Public Cloud End-User Spending to Total $723 Billion in 2025 (Nov 2024) gartner.com ↗
- 3. Synergy Research Group — Cloud Market Annual Revenue Run Rate Topped Half a Trillion Dollars in Q1 (Apr 2026) srgresearch.com ↗
- 4. Flexera — 2026 State of the Cloud Report flexera.com ↗
- 5. Flexera — Cloud Value Is Rising While AI Waste Grows (press release, Mar 2026) flexera.com ↗
- 6. HashiCorp — 2024 State of Cloud Strategy Survey hashicorp.com ↗
- 7. Thales — 2025 Global Cloud Security Study (Jun 2025) cpl.thalesgroup.com ↗
- 8. Thales — 2026 Data Threat Report (Feb 2026) cpl.thalesgroup.com ↗
- 9. IBM — Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025 (Jul 2025) ibm.com ↗
- 10. Gartner — Market Share: Database Management Systems, Worldwide, 2024 (May 2025) gartner.com ↗
- 11. Gartner — Forecast Analysis: Database Management Systems, Worldwide (2025 update, Dec 2025) gartner.com ↗
