If you manage cloud infrastructure, you already know that compute optimization has had its moment. Teams have rightsized instances, adopted spot and reserved pricing, and built automation around scaling policies. But there's a line item on your cloud bill that's been steadily compounding while all that attention went elsewhere: block storage.

Block storage can represent up to 45% of your cloud storage spend, and across hundreds of enterprise assessments, we've found that up to 70% of that spend is wasted. The average disk utilization hovers around 25 to 30%. That means for every dollar you spend on EBS volumes, Managed Disks, or Persistent Disks, you're getting roughly 30 cents of value.

Why storage waste is so universal

The pattern is the same everywhere, regardless of industry, cloud provider, or operating system. When a new workload spins up, nobody knows exactly how much storage it will need, so the safe move is to provision generously. Running out of disk space means downtime, and downtime means pages at 2 AM. Over-provisioning is the rational choice.

The problem is what happens next: nothing. Expanding a disk when it fills up is manual, but fairly straightforward in cloud portals. Shrinking one back down is worse. It requires downtime, multiple FTEs, change windows, and a spreadsheet to coordinate. So most teams never do it. The overprovisioned disk sits there, month after month, billing you for capacity your data never touches.

Multiply that across thousands of disks and hundreds of applications, and you have a significant cost problem hiding in plain sight. Gartner recently highlighted this gap, recommending that enterprises rightsize storage utilization and deploy continuous automation to reduce cloud storage costs.

What if your storage could manage itself?

This is the question we set out to answer when we built Lucidity AutoScaler. Instead of relying on engineers to guess capacity needs, monitor utilization, and manually resize disks, AutoScaler handles all of it autonomously. It expands disks in real time when your data grows, and (the part that was previously impossible) shrinks them back down with zero downtime when that capacity is no longer needed.

The result is disk utilization that stays in the 75 to 80% range continuously, without anyone having to touch it. Customers typically see up to 70% cost reduction on block storage, reclaim hundreds of engineering hours that were sunk into provisioning tasks, and eliminate storage-related downtime entirely.

See it in action: live webinar on May 28

If you're curious about how this works in practice, we're hosting a 30-minute live walkthrough of AutoScaler on Thursday, May 28, 2026 at 9:00 AM PT. We'll cover why cloud block storage has gone overlooked in optimization efforts to date, how AutoScaler solves the complexity that's prevented teams from tackling this problem, and you'll see a live product demo with real-time disk expands and shrinks in action.

We'll also walk through how to set policies, report on results, and explore common use cases for ITOps, DevOps, and FinOps teams. And there will be time for Q&A at the end, so bring your toughest questions.

Register for the AutoScaler walkthrough webinar  (May 28, 9:00 AM PT  |  30 minutes)

Whether you're a platform engineer wishing for fewer Sev1 alerts, a DevOps lead looking to eliminate provisioning toil, or a cloud architect trying to build a business case for storage optimization, this session will give you a clear picture of what's possible and how to get started.

Your data is always changing. Your storage should be too.