February 17, 2026

Hidden infrastructure costs can jeopardize your organization’s future  

You can’t fix a problem if you don’t know about it. And for CIOs, a big problem is that many infrastructure costs are hidden. Inefficiencies and misconfigurations, environmental sprawl, indirect operational spend and evolving compute usage patterns are among the issues that contribute to this.      
These costs, vanishing into the shadows of the technology estate, can add up to billions of dollars in potential reinvestment funds. While finance teams reconcile spreadsheets and engineering teams optimize what they can see, nobody’s seeing the full picture, and so the majority of infrastructure spending operates in a vast blind spot.

When organizations can't see infrastructure costs clearly, strategically determining where to cut — which workloads are delivering value versus burning budget, for example — and where to invest becomes incredibly challenging.  

Rooting out the hidden costs  

Where exactly are these hidden costs lurking?

• In the gaps between systems. Your cloud provider reports spending on the compute and storage your organization uses. But what about the on-premises infrastructure still running half of critical applications or the data center costs that never make it into the same report? These aren't footnotes; they're substantial investments operating outside unified views.
• In resources nobody remembered to shut down. Think development environments that were supposed to run for only 18 months or storage volumes attached to long-deleted virtual machines. When visibility is fragmented, such digital ghosts can multiply unchecked.
• In the reconciliation itself. IT teams burn countless hours correlating data across platforms and managing multiple vendor relationships. Time spent reconciling is time not spent optimizing.
• In the misallocations. Without unified visibility, organizations can't accurately allocate costs to the business units, products or customer accounts they actually support. Strategic decisions get made on incomplete data.

Why you must thoroughly examine your operations now

What makes hidden infrastructure costs particularly insidious is that they compound.

Every month an organization operates without visibility is another month of waste multiplying across the environment. Savings that could have been captured get lost. Budget that could have funded innovation instead subsidizes inefficiencies that weren't even known to exist.

Spending smart, with clear visibility into where every dollar goes and what value it delivers, is how companies will win in their markets. Surfacing hidden costs before your competitors surface theirs gives you an edge.

What becomes possible with better insight?

Consider what becomes possible when hidden infrastructure costs are brought into the light.

• Those savings could fund AI initiatives.
• They could address organizational vulnerabilities.
• They could accelerate digital transformation projects currently stuck in budget negotiations.
• They could free up resources to invest in the capabilities businesses truly need rather than subsidizing waste.

DXC's Total FinOps solution brings unified visibility across entire technology estates, surfacing the hidden costs that are draining budgets and creating opportunities for strategic reinvestment. Total FinOps, which leverages the IBM Cloudability financial management platform and Flexera One IT asset management, is not just about cloud. It’s about the overall infrastructure and being able to bring that together so the organization can benefit, according to Andrew Haigh, DXC head of Cloud & Infrastructure.

With Total FinOps, you’ll be prepared to make informed IT decisions by understanding the real-time costs of provisioning your unique business processes in a multi/hybrid-cloud environment and be empowered to align technology investments to true business value.