The $27 Billion Leak No One Wants to Admit

9 min read Original article ↗

Dia Varlyani

Last month, a CTO whispered into our call — actually whispered “Please don’t use my name, but we have 41 monitoring tools.”

Forty-one.
He pays for all of them.
I almost spilled my coffee. Forty-one tools?
And he still gets paged at 3 a.m.

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This article is what I wish someone had sent him two years ago. Let’s talk about the leak nobody wants to admit. Enterprises are bleeding $9–27 billion every year because of inefficiencies in IT Operations1.

In simple terms, IT Operations covers everything that keeps a company’s technology running:
· DevOps: building and releasing software
· SecOps: keeping the company safe from cyber threats
· SRE Ops: ensuring systems stay up, fast, and reliable
· FinOps: controlling cloud and infrastructure costs

The core problem?

All these teams use different tools, different dashboards, and different languages — and none of them talk to each other. So companies end up with 20, 30, even 41 different tools doing overlapping work.

There is an urgent and clear need to unify these functions. Companies must adopt Unified Operations platforms to finally fix this “tool sprawl” and broken, disconnected processes. Done right, this shift delivers a 3–4x ROI1. Yet most companies still aren’t switching. Why?

Because humans hate change more than they hate losing money.
That’s it.
That’s the tweet.

Enterprises don’t fail because they lack data. They fail because:
· their data sits in different tools,
· their teams speak different languages,
· and nobody can connect engineering reality to the P&L.

In this world of too much data — we are drowning in dashboards and alerts — operational fragmentation has quietly become one of the most expensive and least understood crises in enterprise technology. The tools we bought to bring control have, ironically, created chaos.

The Crisis of Operational Fragmentation

The modern enterprise runs on software, but the machinery that keeps that software alive — the operations stack — is in crisis.

Manoj Kumar, former Director-IT at Allstate Corporation, told me:
“The biggest blind spot is change management. Monday mornings after a change window are a nightmare — we pray everything works because no one truly knows what a change will break across the estate. We need a system that tells us upfront: ‘If you touch this, these applications will be affected.’”

Why This Matters Now

· Cloud adoption has outpaced operational maturity — and it is expensive.
· Complexity is scaling faster than the teams managing it.
· Fragmentation is no longer a technical inconvenience — it’s a strategic risk that hits revenue, margins, and competitive positioning.
· And most importantly, the power of true automation has been unleashed by AgenticAI. More of this later

What Exactly Are Silos and Tool Sprawl? Two interconnected problems that feed each other viciously.
Operational Silos
A silo is a domain where data, accountability, and decisions stay trapped. Misalignment is baked in. Real-world outcomes:
· FinOps cuts costs → SRE loses reliability
· Dev ships fast → SecOps opens a ticket nobody reads
· Everyone points fingers at 3 a.m.

Tool Sprawl — The Real Picture: Inside today’s enterprises:
· Dev wants speed
· SecOps wants to block half the deploys
· FinOps wants to save ₹150/hour
· SRE gets paged at 3 a.m. because someone spun up GPU instances “for testing”
· Thursday-night hero developer becomes Friday-morning villain in four Slack channels

Cannot afford to get customer experience wrong in a SaaS solution.
Errors, app crashes are very high risk — ITSM services must be proactive & solve issues before they occur.

Amey Kadle:
“If everything goes viral and then customers churn at once, it can shut the company down instantly. I’ve seen this with four startups…”

Why Fragmentation Persists: The Human Factor. This is the part consultants avoid:
Humans fear disruption more than inefficiency.

Sanjaya Rao:
“Teams have spent years getting their observability right. If someone says ‘change this,’ it won’t happen. The challenge is not technical — it’s human behaviour.”

“BYOT — Bring Your Own Tool — changed everything. Adoption shifted from 18-month wars to: “Sure, we’ll pilot next quarter.”

Manoj Kumar:
“Departments have become kingdoms. In some companies, there is zero centralisation — Dev runs its own tools, Infra runs its own, DevOps runs its own. They only talk when something breaks: ‘My tool says this.’ ‘My tool says that.’ A centralised system is the only real solution.”

One major bank was running 37 separate monitoring tools before they finally consolidated.
Thirty-seven!
And we wonder why people burn out!

That’s exactly what happens today — for a problem none of the 37–41 tools caught in time. But how about the “Unified Connected Agent model” you may ask:
· One policy, one platform, one truth.
· Unified across teams, departments and tools.
· AI-powered automated actioning of ITSM processes.
· The GPU instance never gets spun up.
· Everyone sleeps.

The Data: What Fragmentation Actually Costs
Real deployments (2024–2025)(1):
· ROI: 250–450%(1)
· Payback: 6–12 months
· Cloud savings: 10–25%(1)
· Incidents reduced: 20–50%

Manoj Kumar:
“If systems are down for even an hour, customers go elsewhere. In a bank it’s millions the moment transactions stop — and the worst part is most of that is pure missed opportunity: money you’ll never see and can never measure.”

He went on further:

“Even in an organization not doing direct customer transactions, outages cause inconvenience — not direct money loss. But in a real bank, if systems are down even for one hour, imagine thousands of people inconvenienced at the same time. That immediately becomes millions in lost business.”

On how long a company can afford to be down:

“And honestly, you cannot afford systems to be down more than a minute or two. Three minutes, four minutes — beyond that, customers have already moved. If the system is down for two days, then better you find a new business. You are not fit to be in this business.”

One bank (Zenoss case study(2)) replaced 37 monitoring tools and funded 65% headcount growth from the savings alone.
(Side note: if you’re in India, replace “that bank” with the top private bank whose app you used for UPI this morning. Same story, different country.)
There’s a point where chaos becomes “normal.”
It isn’t.

The Solution: Unified Operations & Intelligent Orchestration using AgenticAI
* Not another point tool — a single intelligent operating system for the cloud era.
* When used in this scenario , an AI agent is the perfect tool — always on — observing 24x7- intelligently diagnosing — continuously improving — recommending change in real-time — (most importantly) — Triggering ITSM service flows. What more can we ask for?
* A Cross-Domain Causality Engine mapping: code change → security risk → reliability impact → dollar profitability
* Developer provisions an expensive resource →system blocks it → suggests a cheaper compliant version → shows savings.
* Governance at the speed of thought.

Manoj Kumar:
“Unify InfraOps, DevOps, FinOps, SRE, and change management into one flow. Add agentic AI — that’s the future.”

The Industry Transformation:

Sanjaya Rao:
“Next two years. The platform will drive everything along with AI. This will disrupt the entire managed-services industry.”

Just two years.
Not five.

Enter AgenticAI — look beyond the hype
Up until the advent of AgenticAI, actions were business rules driven and very basic alerting systems. AgenticAI significantly enhances the capabilities to “take actions”. It is not just an observer — it take action across the IT service management processes. It is unified, intelligent and executes IT operations using any ITSM tools across all use cases.
· AgenticAI unifies comprehensively. Works on top of existing tools seamlessly with MCP.
· AgenticAI automates intelligently. Learns and adapts to processes unique to the team.
· AgenticAI executes crucial actions proactively. Diagnoses, predicts, recommends, creates tickets and executes them too.

Manoj Kumar:
“A single platform monitoring DevOps, SRE, FinOps, SecOps, and change management is a boon to society.”

Operational resilience isn’t optional.

On AgenticAI: The Bias and Cost Reality

Sanjaya Rao:
“For critical operations — human-in-the-loop is mandatory.”

Amey Kadle:
“AI is a powerful, biased tool… take whatever it tells you with a pinch of salt.”
“Burning GPU cycles for cold coffee recipes while an engineer debugs on a ₹40,000 phone with 2% battery makes no sense.”

The North Star

Sanjaya Rao:
“Every feature must add value to the platform and to the customer.”

Amey Kadle:
“Get the right mindset with your people.”

Manoj Kumar, final word:
“If I were a CIO today, I’d look for one product that takes information from all layers instead of acting in silos.”

Anyway.
· If you just muttered “this is my life,” reply with a 🔥 or drop a mail.
· If you’re the developer getting blamed at 3 a.m., I want to hear from you most.
· If you’re building the fix — let’s talk before someone else ships it.

The two-year clock isn’t waiting.
“And the next time your company posts about ‘net-zero goals’ and ‘cutting carbon emissions,’ remember this: every duplicate tool you refuse to retire is quietly burning a small power plant’s worth of energy — while the on-call engineer is still debugging the outage on 2% battery.”

Embrace the power of unified, intelligent IT operations across DevOps, SecOps, SREOps and FinOps today.

References & Voices
Direct interviews, November 2025
· Sanjaya Rao — Founder, EveryOps.ai
· Amey Kadle — CEO, Ajinkya Technologies
· Manoj Kumar P A (PhD) — Former Director-IT, Allstate Corporation; ex-Head Shared Services, World Bank

1.Primary Gartner Sources (2024–2025)
• Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Public Cloud End-User Spending to Total $723 Billion in 2025 (Nov 19, 2024). Basis for estimating $9–27B cloud waste using 30% inefficiency on $723B; supports ROI range of 250–450% and savings of 10–25% from unified operations benchmarks.
https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-11-19-gartner-forecasts-worldwide-public-cloud-end-user-spending-to-total-723-billion-dollars-in-2025

• Reining in Cloud Wastage by Stopping Over-Provisioning — BigDataWire, citing Gartner (Aug 27, 2024). Notes ~$135B cloud waste in 2024, scalable to 2025.
https://www.bigdatawire.com/2024/08/27/reining-in-cloud-wastage-by-stopping-over-provisioning/

2.Zenoss Case Studies (Referenced 2025)
• Huntington Bank Success Story — Zenoss (2019; referenced 2025). Documented replacement of 37 monitoring tools; savings funded 65% headcount growth.
https://www.zenoss.com/resources/huntington-bank-success-story

3.Secondary Industry Research (Author’s Supporting Sources)
• Cloud Cost Optimization Mastery for C-Suite Executives — Veritis (Sept 1, 2025). Supports 10–25% sustained cloud cost savings and ROI improvements.
https://www.veritis.com/blog/cloud-cost-optimization-and-management-trends-analysis-and-strategy/

• Multi-Cloud Cost Management: Maximize ROI Across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud — Opsio (July 8, 2025). Cites 25–40% initial savings and 10–25% ongoing optimization gains.
https://opsiocloud.com/blogs/multi-cloud-cost-management-maximize-roi-across-aws-azure-and-google-cloud/