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The advertised benefits of IaaS/PaaS public cloud (flexibility, agile provisioning, scalability and "operational expenditure not capital expenditure") come with a price tag — the organizational angst related to variable/unpredictable costs and the accounting, procurement and governance changes associated with monthly bills that may cause sticker shock. As a result, organizations seek to impose process and discipline on their public cloud spending, given that cloud is the foundational digital economy enabler (and therefore part of the cost of doing business). In our recent Cloud, Hosting & Managed Services, Budgets & Outlook 2024 survey, nearly half of organizations said they spent more on IaaS/PaaS public cloud in 2023 than originally projected, and nearly two-thirds anticipated overshooting their cloud budgets in 2024. The ongoing misalignment of budgeted spending versus actual spending, more so than year-over-year expansion of public cloud spending, is problematic.