The Cloud You Already Bought
Why most executives don't have a cloud spending problem — they have a cloud utilization problem
Every year, around renewal season, I get some version of the same question from a client. Should we be spending less on the cloud, or more? It's a fair question. It's also the wrong one, and I tell them so.
The right question is smaller, and most executives have never actually sat down and answered it: of everything we're already paying for, how much is anyone using?
Nobody asks it because "the cloud" doesn't feel like a budget line an executive owns. It feels like IT's problem, or a vendor's product, or a decision someone made two contract cycles ago and never revisited. I understand the instinct. I've also watched it cost company after company money and capability at the same time — paying for licenses nobody opens, then buying a new tool to solve a problem the old subscription already solved, quietly, in a feature nobody ever turned on.
None of what follows requires a technology background. It requires forty-five minutes, an admin password, and the willingness to actually look.
Three Things To Check Before You Renew
First, pull your usage report and cancel what's dormant. Every Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace plan comes with an admin console, and every admin console has one. Sort it by last login. Anyone who hasn't signed in for sixty days is either in the wrong role or gone from the company entirely — and you're still paying for them either way. Gartner has put a number on this: roughly 30 percent of SaaS spend qualifies as what it calls "toxic," meaning nobody is using it. On a fifty-license Microsoft 365 Business Premium agreement, that typically works out to eight or ten dormant licenses — call it $2,000 to $2,500 a year, recovered in the time it takes to sort a spreadsheet.
Second, stop paying premium prices for basic usage. Most companies default their whole staff onto whichever tier IT or a vendor originally recommended, then never check it again. CoreView found that the average Microsoft 365 environment could cut costs by roughly 14 percent just by matching license tier to actual need — not by cutting anyone off, simply by moving the people who never touch the premium features down a tier and reserving the top tier for the handful who do. On Google Workspace, this usually means general staff belong on Business Standard, with Business Plus reserved for finance, HR, and anyone handling regulated data.
Third — and this is the one that actually creates value instead of just recovering it — find out what you already own and have never turned on. Ask whoever manages your platform for the full feature list on your current plan, then mark what's actually configured. On Microsoft 365 Business Premium, that list usually includes workflow automation, meeting transcription, device security, and AI-assisted drafting, most of it sitting dormant. On Google Workspace, it's typically no-code app building and data governance tools nobody remembers exist. Before you sign off on any new software purchase this quarter, check the request against that list first. Often enough, what someone wants to buy is already sitting in what you already pay for. It just needs to be switched on, and someone shown how to use it.
Who Actually Does This
In a mid-size company, this belongs to someone by name — a CFO, a COO, or a fractional CIO brought in for exactly this kind of review — and it belongs on the renewal calendar, thirty to forty-five days out, every time. Not because the review is complicated. Because nothing happens to anything that isn't on somebody's calendar.
In a smaller, founder-led business, the owner is whoever is reading this. There's no department to hand it to. Block an hour, open the console, and run the first two checks yourself; most of what turns up takes minutes to fix once you're actually looking at it. The third check is worth one call to whoever manages your platform, even if that's an outside provider you only hear from twice a year.
The Part That's Easy to Forget
None of this is really about the cloud. It's about a habit most organizations never build — treating what you already own as the first place you check, not the last.
Buying something new feels like progress. Reviewing what you already pay for feels like maintenance, which is exactly why it keeps getting skipped. That's backward, and it's an expensive habit to keep. The companies that get the least out of their technology budget aren't the ones spending too little. They're the ones who never stopped to ask what they'd already bought.
Run the three checks before your next renewal. Then put a date on next year's calendar to run them again. That's the whole discipline, and it pays for itself before you spend another dollar on anything new.
If you lead a mid-size organization and want someone to run this review against your actual agreement — usage, tier fit, and unused capability — that's the kind of focused engagement a fractional CIO relationship is built for.
Talk to TEAM Solutions Group about a Fractional CIO engagement →
If you run a smaller, founder-led business and would rather hand this off than do it yourself, TSG offers a lightweight spend assessment built for exactly this.