Compute and storage get the scrutiny in most cost reviews. Networking rarely does — until someone finally reads the itemized bill and finds egress sitting near the top.
Flat networks route traffic the expensive way
Without deliberate routing policy, traffic between two services in the same region can end up taking the longest, most expensive path available — out through a public gateway and back in, instead of staying on a private, low-cost path the whole way. Nobody designed it that way; it's just what happens by default when connectivity isn't managed.
Redundant transit adds up quietly
It's common to find the same data crossing a cloud-to-cloud boundary multiple times — once for replication, once for a backup job, once for an analytics pipeline — each paying egress independently because nobody has a single view of what's actually moving where.
Managed connectivity turns variable cost into fixed cost
A dedicated interconnect or managed network layer usually comes with contracted bandwidth pricing instead of per-byte egress. For high-volume paths, that alone can be the difference between a cost that scales linearly with usage and one that doesn't.
The fix starts with visibility, not a new contract
Before signing anything, most teams benefit from simply seeing where their cross-environment traffic actually flows. It's common to find that a small number of paths account for the majority of transit cost — and those are exactly the paths worth moving onto managed connectivity first.