Balancing Cost Optimization with Performance and Resilience: Ensuring financial efficiency without compromising business-critical operations

The Balancing Act Every Enterprise Faces

Enterprises today are under intense pressure to rein in cloud costs. In fact, according to a report commissioned by Azul, more than 80% of CIOs admit to exceeding their budgets by an average of 30%, making cloud spend one of the top three IT budget line items. While financial efficiency is critical, cost-cutting cannot come at the expense of performance or resilience. For mission-critical systems such as tier-1 databases, cloud storage decisions directly influence application speed, availability, and security. Striking the right balance between optimization and operational assurance requires more than budget oversight—it requires visibility and clearly defining performance requirements.

Visibility: The Foundation of Cost-Performance Balance

The first challenge enterprises face is a lack of visibility into their provisioned and consumed resources. Based on hundreds of cloud storage assessments conducted by Lucidity, we have witnessed that organizations, on average, are only utilizing 30% of their provisioned storage capacity, due to idle resources, overprovisioning, misaligned storage tiers, lack of visibility. Without visibility, IT and FinOps teams are forced to make decisions in the dark, unable to connect actual utilization to business requirements.

A visibility-first approach allows organizations to understand:

• What has been provisioned versus what is actually used
• Which workloads require high performance versus those that don’t
• How resources can be tiered without undermining resilience

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By making costs transparent and tying them back to utilization, organizations create the foundation for educated decisions that balance optimization with operational needs.

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Mission-Critical Storage: Where Performance Comes First

Block storage is a prime example of where cost and performance must be managed with precision. Unlike object storage, which is often used for backups or archives, block storage underpins tier-1 databases and transactional applications—such as Oracle RAC, Microsoft SQL Server Always On, or PostgreSQL clusters. These workloads demand high throughput and low latency to meet business SLAs.

Public cloud providers offer multiple tiers of block storage (e.g., AWS io1/io2 for high IOPS, gp3 for general performance, st1/sc1 for lower-cost throughput). But enterprises often fall into the trap of overprovisioning high-performance storage, paying for IOPS they don’t need. This is where the principle of diminishing returns applies: beyond a certain point, spending more on performance provides little incremental business value. Visibility into utilization and workload patterns is what enables teams to right-size resources—preserving performance where it matters most while reducing unnecessary spend.

The rise of AI and data-intensive workloads is another use case and example of this challenge. Training and inference require a blend of compute and high-performance storage, yet the surrounding data lakes and pipelines often grow unchecked. According to Adobe Research, up to 83% of data lake storage can be optimized through practices such as tiering, compression, and performance-aware placement.

For enterprises running AI, the cost-performance balance is no longer optional—it is business-critical. Without visibility, AI projects risk ballooning costs that erode ROI, while under-provisioning risks undermining innovation velocity. Here again, visibility into usage and alignment with workload requirements is the only way to deliver both efficiency and resilience.

Best Practices: How Enterprises Can Strike the Balance

Achieving balance requires a cultural and operational shift:

• Start with Visibility: Implement tagging, cost attribution, and dashboards that make spend transparent at the workload and team level.
• Adopt a FinOps Culture: Embed cost accountability across engineering, DevOps, and product—not just finance.
• Tier Storage Strategically: Place mission-critical workloads on SSDs, while pushing colder data to lower-cost options.
• Continuously Right-Size: Monitor utilization and scale resources down when performance headroom isn’t delivering proportional value.
• Plan for Resilience: Optimize without compromising RTOs, RPOs, or security—true efficiency includes operational assurance.

Visibility as the Common Thread

Enterprises cannot afford to treat cost optimization, performance, and resilience as competing priorities. The true challenge is balance. By starting with visibility and embedding it into FinOps practices, organizations can right-size their environments, optimize spend, and maintain the resilience that business-critical operations demand.

In the end, visibility isn’t just a tool for cutting costs—it’s the key to ensuring that financial efficiency and operational excellence work hand in hand.

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