Quarterly cloud financial audits revealed that Databricks compute and Snowflake warehouse expenditures surged by 185% over the last two quarters to $142,000/month, while underlying business data volume increased by merely 12%. Investigations uncovered over-provisioned 24/7 fixed-size Spark clusters, oversized Snowflake virtual warehouses idling with 10-minute auto-suspend timeouts, un-vacuumed Delta tables retaining 90 days of dead parquet snapshots, and unindexed full-table scans. FinOps and executive leadership have issued an urgent mandate to reduce monthly platform costs by at least 35% without degrading business SLAs.