Cloud consumption is the amount of cloud capacity, services, or usage that workloads draw over time. It can include compute hours, storage, network traffic, and managed services, and is commonly tracked through provider metrics and billing data.
Consumption data helps teams understand workload demand, plan capacity, and manage costs. In security and governance, it can also highlight unexpected changes that warrant investigation, such as a sudden increase in resource use. However, low or declining usage does not prove a resource is safe to remove: it may support backups, recovery, logging, or hidden dependencies. Teams should review ownership, purpose, and security impact before changing or retiring cloud resources.