Cloud spending is increasingly tied to decisions about artificial intelligence, application modernization and the distribution of workloads across different environments. For European businesses, the challenge is no longer simply moving infrastructure to the cloud. It is ensuring that the resulting investment delivers measurable value without creating new financial and operational pressures.
The scale of the problem is becoming clearer as cloud environments expand. According to 2026 State of the Cloud Report, 85% of surveyed organizations identified managing cloud spending as a major challenge, while estimated waste in infrastructure and platform services reached 29% of spending.
The report also found that 63% of organizations had established FinOps teams. This reflects a shift toward treating cloud economics as an ongoing management discipline rather than a task performed after infrastructure has been deployed.
For European enterprises, these pressures intersect with data protection requirements, legacy technology and the need to support workloads across public cloud, private infrastructure and software-as-a-service platforms. Optimizing costs therefore requires a broader understanding of how applications are architected, which resources they consume and how those resources contribute to business outcomes.
Top cloud cost optimization consulting companies in Europe
Companies comparing cloud cost optimization consulting companies in Europe should assess more than providers’ ability to identify unused resources. Relevant capabilities include cloud architecture reviews, workload sizing, consumption monitoring, licensing optimization, financial governance and the ability to connect technical changes with measurable savings.
FinOps practices are particularly relevant because they bring finance, engineering and business teams into the same decision-making process. This can help organizations understand the cost of individual workloads, establish accountability and evaluate whether additional cloud capacity or AI infrastructure is generating sufficient business value.
Sonata Software is one company operating across cloud transformation and modernization. Its cloud transformation services focus on modernizing legacy applications, infrastructure and data centers, with an emphasis on cloud-native solutions and the management of technology costs across SaaS, cloud and on-premises environments.
This combination is relevant when cloud spending is linked to architectural decisions rather than isolated inefficiencies. For example, modernizing an application may change its resource requirements, while consolidating platforms can affect licensing, maintenance and operational costs. Such initiatives require an assessment of the existing environment before deciding which changes will deliver the greatest value.
Organizations evaluating Sonata or other providers should request a baseline of current spending, a prioritized list of optimization opportunities and a measurement framework for tracking results. They should also distinguish between immediate savings and longer-term investments needed to improve reliability, security or scalability.
Cloud cost optimization is ultimately a continuous process. As workloads change and AI becomes more deeply embedded in enterprise operations, companies will need governance models that connect infrastructure consumption to business performance. Providers that combine technical modernization with financial visibility can help organizations make those decisions with a clearer understanding of both cost and value.