But here’s what almost no founder realizes until it’s too late: the same cost chaos hiding waste in your AWS account is also hiding the misconfigurations that cause million-dollar breaches.

Recent research confirms that most cloud breaches don’t come from sophisticated hackers—they come from misconfigurations and credential exposure: over-permissive IAM roles, publicly exposed S3 buckets, missing logging, and credentials left in code repositories. The average cost of a data breach in 2025? $4.76 million globally, according to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report, and over $9.5 million in the US and UK. For finance and healthcare companies, breach costs regularly exceed $10 million.

Meanwhile, your AWS spend keeps growing with no clear accountability, and you can’t tell if you’re paying for productive workloads or forgotten test environments burning $800/month.

The question isn’t whether you’ll face a breach or a budget blowout. It’s which one hits first—and whether you’ll be ready.

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The Hidden Risk: Cost Chaos = Security Chaos

When your AWS environment lacks visibility, two things happen simultaneously:

1. You overspend on infrastructure you don’t need

Startups routinely waste 30-40% of their AWS budget on idle resources, over-provisioned instances, unattached storage, and services teams forgot they spun up. Common culprits include:

• Unattached EBS volumes and orphaned snapshots ($100-300/month each).

• Development environments running 24/7 when they’re only used 8 hours/day ($300-800/month).

• Oversized EC2 instances that could drop to smaller types with zero performance impact.

• Lack of Savings Plans or Reserved Instances when usage is predictable.

2. You expose your company to preventable breaches

The exact same lack of governance that lets costs spiral also creates security gaps:

• IAM roles with overly broad permissions (the #1 cause of AWS security incidents).

• S3 buckets accidentally set to public.

• No centralized logging or monitoring, so you can’t detect or investigate incidents.

• Forgotten admin credentials and API keys left in repos or Slack threads.

Result: A $50K/month AWS bill you can’t explain, sitting on top of security holes that could trigger a $5M breach.

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Why Startups and SMBs Get Hit Hardest

Large enterprises have dedicated cloud security teams and FinOps analysts. Startups and small/mid-market teams don’t—and they can’t afford to hire them.

You’re stuck in a painful trap:

• Your engineers are stretched thin shipping features; they don’t have bandwidth to audit IAM policies or hunt for idle resources.

• Leadership sees the AWS bill growing but has no clear breakdown by team, product, or environment.

• You know you should run a security audit and cost review, but hiring a full-time cloud architect or security lead costs $150K-200K/year (plus equity).

So you postpone it. And every month, the risk compounds.

Ready to stop postponing?
Book a free 30-minute discovery call. We’ll walk through your AWS footprint and show you exactly where waste and risk are hiding—no obligation.

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The Fractional Cloud Wizard Solution: Security + Cost, Without the Full-Time Hire

This is where a fractional cloud security and cost consultant changes the equation.

Instead of gambling your AWS spend and security posture on “it’ll probably be fine,” you bring in an expert part-time—someone who:

• Runs automated security audits using Prowler (240+ AWS security controls mapped to CIS, SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, and the AWS Well-Architected Security Pillar )

• Delivers cost visibility and anomaly detection using Vantage (daily cost tracking, forecasts, and alerts sent to Slack/email/Teams/Jira so nothing slips).

• Provides an executive-ready report with prioritized remediation steps your engineers can action immediately—no 50-page PDFs that sit in Google Drive forever.

• Acts as a fractional CTO/cloud security lead for ongoing guidance: architecture reviews, incident response readiness, rightsizing, and cost accountability.

The math is simple: Pay $999-1,999 USD for a one-time audit, or $999-1,500 USD/month for ongoing support—versus $150K+/year for a full-time hire, or $4.8M+ to recover from a breach.

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What You Get: Real Deliverables, Not Vague Advice

When you engage A Cloud Wizard, here’s what lands in your inbox within days:

Security Audit Deliverables

• Automated findings from 240+ AWS security checks using Prowler (IAM, S3, networking, logging, data protection, incident response).

• Risk-ranked remediation plan: high/critical issues first, with clear owners and effort estimates.

• Executive summary you can share with your board or investors: “Here’s our current posture, here’s what we’re fixing, here’s the timeline.”

Cost Audit Deliverables

• Cost breakdown by service, team, environment, and tag so you finally know where money is going.

• Quick wins list: idle resources, rightsizing opportunities, commitment-based savings (Reserved Instances, Savings Plans).

• Anomaly alerts that catch cost spikes the day they happen via Vantage’s machine learning-based anomaly detection.

• Forecasts and budgets tied to your growth metrics, so finance can plan confidently.

Ongoing Fractional CTO Support (Retainer Package)

• One 90-minute strategy session per month with leadership + engineering.

• Always-on cost and security monitoring (anomaly alerts, new findings auto-reported).

• Ad-hoc architecture and risk guidance as you scale.

Want to know what we’d find in YOUR AWS account? Book a free 30-minute discovery call. We’ll walk through your current setup and show you exactly where to look for waste and risk—no sample needed, we’ll talk about your actual environment.

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Case in Point: $50K/Month → $35K/Month + Zero High-Risk Findings

A typical engagement for a Series A SaaS startup running ~$50K/month on AWS:

Before:

• No visibility into which product or team drove costs.

• 6 critical IAM misconfigurations (admin-level roles attached to CI/CD, public S3 bucket with backups).

• $12K/month wasted on dev environments running 24/7, unattached storage, and oversized RDS instances.

After (30 days):

• Cost down to ~$35K/month (30% reduction) via rightsizing, cleanup, and Savings Plans.

• All critical security findings remediated; logging and monitoring baseline established.

• Monthly cost + security check-ins keep the environment lean and compliant as the team ships new features.

ROI: $15K/month saved = $180K/year—paid for the audit 180× over in year one, and prevented a breach that could have cost millions.

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How to Get Started (No Risk, Clear Process)

Step 1: Book a 30-minute discovery call.
We’ll walk through your AWS footprint, pain points, and goals (cost vs security vs both).

Step 2: Choose your package.

• Starter ($999 USD): Security audit or cost audit for 1 AWS account.

• Growth ($1,999 USD): Combined security + cost deep-dive for up to 3 AWS accounts.

• Retainer ($999-1,500 USD/month): Fractional CTO + ongoing monitoring and guidance.

Step 3: Get your report in 5-7 days.
Executive summary + technical backlog + Slack/Jira integration for anomaly alerts.

Step 4: Remediate (with or without us).
Your team can action the backlog, or we can guide implementation as part of a retainer.

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Stop Gambling. Start Optimizing.

Every day you wait, your AWS bill grows—and so does your blast radius if something goes wrong.

The good news? Both problems have the same root cause (lack of visibility and governance), which means one engagement fixes both.

You don’t need a $200K/year cloud architect. You need a Cloud Wizard who can audit your environment in days, give you a clear roadmap, and keep you secure + lean as you scale.

Book Your Free 30-Minute Discovery Call

We’ll review your AWS setup, identify quick wins, and show you exactly what a security + cost audit would deliver. No obligation. No sales pressure.

What we’ll cover in 30 minutes:

– Your current AWS spend and where waste typically hides – Top 3 security risks we see in similar setups – Which audit package fits your stage (Starter, Growth, or Retainer) – Timeline and next steps if you want to move forward.