[MattGaiser]

It is a risk for any company, but the possible harm is variable.

At a prior employer, cloud costs could have doubled or even gone up an order of magnitude and because the margins were so good and the tech costs so low, it wouldn't have mattered and may barely have been noticed. Compute wasn't a substantial business cost in any way, as customers were paying for domain expertise in the product.

At another prior employer, costs scaled with revenue pretty linearly, so while bad, it wouldn't be catastrophic before being noticed as it would also mean increased revenue.

However, for say a company that does video streaming where cloud costs are already enormous, poor cloud usage can cut months off runway. Same with AI, where the money is overwhelmingly being burned on compute.

Cloud waste can happen anywhere, but the harm can range from still a tiny number to destroying the ability to make payroll depending on what you are doing.