Cloud
Why cloud cost and compliance are the same problem
01 August 2026
Ask most platform teams two separate questions — "is this environment compliant?" and "is this environment wasting money?" — and you'll usually get two separate, manually assembled answers, often out of date the moment they're produced.
That's not a coincidence. Both problems have the same root cause: nobody has a continuously up-to-date, accurate inventory of what's actually running, how it's configured, and who owns it. An orphaned volume nobody remembers creating is both a cost leak and, often, an unencrypted or publicly-reachable compliance gap.
This shows up constantly in real environments. A security group left wide open "just for testing" eighteen months ago is a PCI-DSS finding and, because the instance behind it turned out to be oversized and idle half the time, also a cost finding. A decommissioned project's IAM role that was never cleaned up is both an unused-permission risk and, if it still has an attached policy pulling from a paid API, a small but real monthly cost. Multiply either example across a few hundred resources and the pattern becomes the majority of what's wrong with most cloud estates — not exotic misconfigurations, just drift that nobody has a live view of.
Treating cost and compliance as one continuous discipline — not two separate spreadsheets produced before different meetings — is one of the highest-leverage changes a platform team can make. It means the same scan that flags a public S3 bucket also flags that it's been sitting empty and billed for eleven months, and the same remediation ticket closes both findings at once.
It's also the reason we built our own compliance platform to cover both from the same scan, rather than as two products bolted together. If you're curious what that looks like in practice, our Cloud & Kubernetes Performance & Compliance platform is built on exactly this premise.
Frequently asked questions
Is cost optimisation really a security concern?
Indirectly, yes. Unused or forgotten resources are disproportionately likely to also be misconfigured, since nobody is actively maintaining them. Waste is often a symptom of the same lack of ownership that causes compliance drift.
How often should a cloud environment be scanned for both cost and compliance?
Continuously, not periodically. A monthly or quarterly review means drift accumulates for weeks before anyone notices. Continuous scanning catches both a cost leak and a compliance gap within hours of it appearing, not months later.
Do we need separate tools for cost and compliance?
No — and we'd argue you shouldn't want to. Running the same inventory scan once and evaluating it against both cost and compliance rules is simpler to maintain and gives a single source of truth, rather than two tools that can silently disagree about what's actually running.