The riskiest decisions are the routine ones: region choices made on latency alone, broad IAM roles granted to unblock delivery, new services enabled without a cost owner, baseline exceptions approved as one-offs, and automation allowed to change production without review. None looks dangerous alone — the risk comes from never revisiting them.

Every unrecorded decision keeps generating cost and risk after its original context disappears. An exception outlives its sprint, a service outlives its project, an oversized role outlives its team. Because no record links the spend or exposure back to a decision, nobody feels responsible for reversing it.

Ownership works best when it's shared but explicit: platform or cloud-engineering leads own the decision process, FinOps owns cost decisions, security owns risk exceptions, and leadership reviews the aggregate in monthly and quarterly cycles. The failure mode is assuming a tool or a single team owns it implicitly.