Every minute you delay automating and governing your cloud infrastructure is a minute you’re betting your cloud —and your business— on luck. At the same time, you’re exposing your organization to needless risk, growing costs, and lots of unrealized innovation potential.
What’s at stake? The cost of waiting to embrace cloud infrastructure automation is massive, and the financial risk is real.
Contrary to industry optimism, “doing nothing” or choosing to “wait and see” isn’t neutral. It’s a strategic liability — and a high-stakes game of testing how many ways your cloud can drive up your costs (and your worries) before you address it. And it’s not just about lost revenue, either. It’s operational chaos, non-stop regulatory headaches, and engineering talent wasted on damage control.
The longer you wait to invest in cloud infrastructure automation, the deeper the hole you dig, and the harder it becomes to climb out. Let’s break down exactly why dragging your feet can get so expensive, how your cloud risk can compound over time, and what you can do right now to take back control.
The ROI of *Not* Automating
Time to flip the script. Everyone talks about the ROI of automation, but what’s the ROI (or perhaps the anti-ROI) of not automating? Here’s the uncomfortable truth: delaying cloud infrastructure automation is a tax on your business.
Per recent industry benchmarks:
- Misconfigured Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) accounts for as many as 30% of internal incidents.
- Environment mismatches, resource capacity issues, and network misconfigurations add another 30–40%.
- Costs can range from $100/minute (small business) to $25,000/minute (large enterprise)
These aren’t edge cases. They’re the norm in complex, multi-cloud environments. And every hour your team spends firefighting is an hour not spent building, or delivering value.
Plus, if you don’t have a clear answer to questions like these, you’re probably at particularly high risk:
- What is your current per-minute cost?
- Have you identified all your key cost components?
- Are your mitigation strategies adequate?
- How often do you review costs? Is it often enough?
- What's your recovery time objective? What would an outage cost you in that timeframe?
The direct cost of downtime here is just the tip of the iceberg. So, why cloud infra automation, and why now? The longer you wait, the more you pay. Not just in dollars, but in lost momentum, talent burnout, and competitive disadvantage.
🔗 If you’re currently weighing your options and considering Cloud Infrastructure Automation tools, check out our buyers’ guide and purchase checklist.
Industry estimates (like those from the annual DORA State of DevOps Report) show that DevOps-mature companies not only experience 30-40% fewer incidents, but can resolve them much faster, too. Every minute you delay, you risk joining the ranks of those who learn the hard way only after a seven-figure outage.
The Hidden Price Tag of Disaster Complacency
Now, let’s talk numbers. What’s the cost of cloud downtime?
According to a blend of insights from analyst reports (including Ponemon Institute's Cost of Data Center Outages, Gartner's IT Key Metrics Data, and IDC's IT Infrastructure Cost, Value, and Service Analysis):
- For a mid-sized SaaS company, a single minute of downtime can cost $3,000. In financial services, it’s closer to $7,000 per minute.
- Large enterprises? Try $10,000–$18,500 per minute — and that’s just the start.
Now, factor in the frequency:
- Mid-market/small enterprises face between 12 and 18 unplanned outages per year, each lasting 45–90 minutes.
- Large enterprises see, on average, 15–25 outages lasting between 90 and 180 minutes each.
Here’s the kicker. Most of this is preventable, and the cost of doing nothing is higher than it’s ever been.
If you implement robust IaC practices, you could see a major reduction in configuration incidents. Choose to conduct regular disaster recovery testing? That could mean a big drop in average incident duration.
But looking farther ahead, here’s why implementing a fix has to be a long-term commitment in order to succeed.
Embrace Cloud Infrastructure Automation as a Business Standard
Once you’ve embraced cloud infra automation, it needs to become a long-term play for your business — ideally, as part of a Cloud Center of Excellence.
For ongoing ROI optimization, you should:
- Regularly review and optimize policies
- Track new metrics as they become relevant
- Expand implementation to cover more cloud services
- Quantify second-order benefits like faster time-to-market
Otherwise, you fall into the trap of “set-it-and-forget-it” cloud management. Your cloud today isn’t the same cloud it will be in a year, and you never want to be flying blind. Hint: that doesn’t just sound like a bad idea, there’s also a long list of reasons why that fails in the real world.
In short, it’s because cloud environments aren’t static. They’re living, breathing, and —if you’re not careful— drifting out of control. Traditional CMDBs and manual processes can’t keep up with:
- Thousands of accounts and resources spread across multiple clouds — and counting
- Frequent changes and lack of standardized practices
- Gaps in visibility, governance, and policy enforcement
Meanwhile, drift plays the role of silent killer within your cloud infrastructure. It’s not a matter of if, but when, unmanaged changes will lead to misconfiguration, compliance issues, or disastrous outages.
For a single solution to it all? That’s where Firefly comes in.
Firefly isn’t just another tool. It’s your key to uncomplicating cloud chaos and unlocking your cloud ROI, with:
- 100% IaC coverage. (Every resource, every environment: fully codified and governed.)
- Multi-cloud support. (So you get complete visibility, even in the face of cloud sprawl).
- Real-time drift detection and AI-assisted remediation. (That’s 512,000 drifts detected, $3.8M in drift costs identified annually.)
- Policy-as-code governance. (With as many as 3.5M policy violations caught, and an average 61% reduction in cloud waste for customers).
Plus, as much as a 40% improvement in CloudOps efficiency and 24% reduction in service disruptions for Firefly users.
This all paints a clear picture: our customers aren’t just saving hundreds of engineering hours. They’re reclaiming their ability to innovate, scale, and respond to business needs: without fear of the next outage.
Framework for Quantifying Cloud Infrastructure Automation ROI
Based on Firefly’s own data and cloud economics best practices, here's a comprehensive step-by-step look at how to quantify the ROI of cloud infrastructure automation investments.
1. Identify Cost Reduction Categories
This should include direct cost savings and risk mitigation savings. Think: cloud waste elimination, resource optimization, reduced manual labor, or security and service disruption prevention.
2. Pinpoint Productivity & Operational Improvements
Can you achieve faster Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) with a cloud infra automation solution? Would it mean accelerated deployment times or increase cloudops efficiency. Know what you stand to gain, so you can compare it against your actual ROI.
3. Use a ROI Calculation Framework
Step 1: Baseline Current Costs
- Document current cloud spending by service/account
- Track engineering hours spent on cloud management
- Measure frequency and impact of incidents/outages
Step 2: Implementation Investment
- Licensing costs (e.g., $34,800/year for Professional tier)
- Integration/professional services costs
- Internal resource allocation costs
Step 3: Post-Implementation Measurement
- Regular cloud spending tracking
- Engineering time allocation measurement
- Incident frequency and resolution time
Step 4: Calculate ROI Using This Formula:
ROI = (Total Savings - Implementation Costs) / Implementation Costs × 100%.
For a mid-sized organization spending $500K annually on cloud:
- Cloud waste reduction (61%): $305,000 savings
- Engineering hours saved (200 hrs × avg. $75/hr): $15,000
- Reduced downtime (24% less): ~$50,000 (assuming $20K per hour of downtime)
- Total annual savings: $370,000
- Implementation cost (Professional tier): $34,800
Calculated ROI: ($370,000 - $34,800) / $34,800 × 100% = 963% first-year ROI
Making a Business Case? Speak Your Exec Team’s Language
If you’re a Platform or DevOps engineer, you already know the pain of manual fixes and constant firefighting in the cloud. It may sometimes even feel like it’s costing you your sanity, in addition to all those wasted dollars it’s costing your organization. Here’s how you make the case to your execs.
- Quantify your risk: What’s your per-minute cost of downtime? How many incidents did you have last year? What would a 24% reduction in disruptions mean for your bottom line?
- Highlight wasted spend: How much cloud spend is unaccounted for? Exactly how much could you be saving, but aren’t? (And why?)
- Showcase the opportunity: Automation isn’t just about cost avoidance. It’s about freeing your team to deliver faster, innovate more often, and grow without compromise.
🔗 To more easily communicate cloud value to your exec team or board, we’ve compiled a 5 Slide Template: Translating the Value of Cloud into Business Impact. It’s your cheat sheet for clearly showcasing meaningful DevOps and Platform Engineering wins in the boardroom, including cloud cost trends and opportunities, cloud scale and resource efficiency, cloud innovation capacity, and more.
