So what can be done about overprovisioning of resources? Companies can fairly easy install measures to prevent it, Staten says. The best way is by having load balancers written directly into application code that automatically scale up and down resources based on need. Just as important as scaling up though is scaling back down when those resources are no longer needed. Staten warns, however, that enterprises can run into some complications. A bug in a software or a distributed denial-of-service attack can, for example, create false scaling requests for additional resources.

Overprovisioning occurs mostly in infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service instances because those are metered based on an amount of compute or storage, Wagner says. Software-as-a-service offerings traditionally don't have as much of a problem with the issue because they are generally charged on a per-user basis.

It can happen for a number of reasons and Staten says one of the most common is that IT professionals just aren't thinking about the cloud in the right way. Developers and other end users usually ask for more resources than they need so that they don't have to "go back to the well asking for more," Staten says. It requires a "mind-shift" to think small and scale up, he says.

The issue is complicated by the numerous offerings and prices for cloud services in the market, Wagner says. Cloud vendors offer customers a range of options at different prices when purchasing cloud services.

For example, industry-leading Amazon Web Service's popular Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) has four versions of to choose from. They range in price from $0.15 per hour for a small instance that provides 1.7G of memory, a single EC2 compute unit, and 160G of instant storage, all the way up to the extra-large version, which is $1.20 per hour and provides 15G of memory, eight EC2 compute units and 1,600G of instant storage. There are midsize and large offerings falling in between. Beyond that, there are offerings for high-memory on demand and high-CPU offerings, each which have different sizes of compute power as well. Or, customers can choose to purchase reserved instances, which are paid for on an annual basis instead of being metered on an hourly rate. Meanwhile, AWS recently announced its 19th price decrease in the past six years, and Windows Azure and Google dropped their prices as well.