Cloud block storage is one of the largest, and often most overlooked, drivers of cloud cost waste in enterprise environments. Overprovisioned volumes, unused capacity, and misaligned storage tiers quietly inflate monthly bills, leaving millions on the table. The good news? You don’t need risky infrastructure changes or complex migrations to fix it. Forward-thinking organizations are cutting cloud spend at scale by dynamically right-sizing storage and optimizing tier placement, unlocking significant savings while maintaining performance and uptime.
The Problem: Overprovisioning and Waste
Overprovisioning and cloud waste are costing businesses millions. In one case, an enterprise managing 304 AWS accounts had provisioned 44 petabytes (PB) of block storage but used only 13.5 PB – just 30% utilization.
This level of overprovisioning is typical. Teams allocate excessive storage “just in case,” and resizing later is often avoided due to perceived risk or operational friction. As usage grows, so does the cost of this unused capacity.
By implementing a data-driven optimization strategy, the organization projected savings of $2.7 million per month – more than $32 million annually – without impacting performance or uptime.
The Solution: Automated Optimization with Lucidity
Lucidity is a platform that continuously analyzes storage usage and automates both volume right-sizing and tier realignments based on live performance data. It uses built-in cloud APIs to operate across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Lucidity prides itself on:
- Dynamic Right Sizing
Volumes are automatically scaled up or down based on actual usage, eliminating waste while preserving performance.
- Intelligent tier placement
Lucidity adjusts storage class based on access frequency, IOPS, and latency, reducing cost without disrupting workload behavior.
- Out-of-band integration
No agents or inline components are required. Lucidity runs entirely through native APIs, making it easy to evaluate and deploy.
How It Works
Lucidity connects your cloud accounts and gathers telemetry from each block volume, including:
- Provisioned vs. actual usage
- Throughput and IOPS
- Latency and access frequency
- Current storage tier
It uses this data to automatically apply right-sizing or tier changes. All actions are fully auditable, non-disruptive, and reversible. A typical proof of concept takes under an hour to deploy, with results observable in the first billing cycle.
FinOps Value
A data-driven approach puts FinOps leaders in direct control of one of the highest-impact areas of cloud spending without requiring manual engineering effort. Enabling usage-based chargeback promotes cost accountability across business units and improves forecasting accuracy by eliminating excess provisioned capacity from budget baselines. Best of all, it delivers measurable, repeatable savings without adding operational complexity or risk.
How Teams Like Yours Are Saving Millions
Leading organizations are cutting cloud costs without adding risk or complexity by:
- Automatically right-size block volumes based on actual usage.
- Migrating cold or low-IO workloads to lower-cost storage tiers.
- Eliminating unused “just-in-case” capacity across environments.
- Preventing app outages due to volume saturation.
- Reducing manual engineering effort across storage operations.
- Applying optimization consistently across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
- Validating impact through a structured, low-effort proof of concept.
Overprovisioned cloud block storage is silently draining budgets in organizations of all sizes. But with automated, data-driven optimization, you can eliminate waste, improve cost accountability, and unlock significant savings, without disrupting your environment or adding operational overhead. Ready to see the impact for yourself? Contact Verinext to schedule a low-effort proof of concept and start optimizing your cloud storage spend today.
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