The Shadow Cloud Spend: $50k a Month FinOps Audit of Forgotten Dev Accounts

The Shadow Cloud Spend: $50k a Month Hiding in Forgotten Dev Accounts Every mid-size engineering organization has 5 to 15 AWS accounts that nobody actively owns. The "POC" account from 2024. The "team-old-name" account that survived the 2025 reorg. The "consultant-X-temp" account that got a working IAM role and then went quiet. Each one runs a few NAT gateways, an idle RDS, EBS volumes from 2023, and a CloudWatch log group with infinite retention. Shadow cloud spend in those forgotten account...