"The whole premise of the cloud should be to drive the IT director to think small, but people aren't doing that," says Sharon Wagner, president of Cloudyn, an Israeli company whose SaaS application helps businesses monitor their cloud usage and provides recommendations on how to right-size it. "Many customers are over provisioning, which leads directly to over paying."

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Experts agree. "I think it's a problem just about everyone could be facing," says Paul Burns, an independent cloud analyst at Neovise. Burns believes there is somewhat of a misnomer about paying for cloud services. While many consumers think they are paying for resources they use in the cloud, instead users are actually paying for a certain capacity of compute or storage. Whether they use it or not is up to them.

"Just about every customer likely has an issue with this," says James Staten, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester. "Some have had that shock bill from their service provider so they've gotten pretty good at dealing with it, but almost everyone could benefit from taking a closer look at their actual usage."