A recent survey of 350 Information Technology professionals, who are also said to be cloud decision makers, reveals that while 85 percent of organizations feel confident managing cloud expenditure, 82 percent admit to incurring unnecessary cloud costs.
In support of this, Gartner predicts that through 2024, 60 percent of infrastructure and operations leaders will encounter public cloud cost overruns. This is in the context of organizations continuing to increase their cloud spend rapidly.
The survey was commissioned by Virtana (a multi-cloud environment platform) and conducted by Arlington Research.
The issues revealed are not only about cloud costs, but there are also other operability issues that feature within the analysis. For example, disjointed tools. Here, 72 percent of respondents said they do not like the process of piecing together disparate management tools to monitor and manage everything from infrastructure performance to cloud cost and migration readiness.
In relation to this point, 62 percent of the poll report they often find themselves cobbling together multiple tools, systems, and custom scripts to get a global view of cloud costs.
Another concern relates to intra-organisation silos. With this, 68 percent of all respondents stated their teams operate in silos and 70 percent of respondents said limited collaboration hinders their ability to adapt quickly and improve business outcomes.
With the expenditure matter, 82 percent of respondents have incurred unnecessary cloud costs, which can eat into budgets needed for other areas of transformation. Expenditure is also the product of poor cost optimization. With this issue, 56 percent lack programmatic cloud cost management capabilities, which can mean either that teams are spending too much time managing cloud costs or that cloud waste is allowed to fester.
There is also a lack of visibility across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. This point was noted by 84 percent of the respondents. The primary issue is with running workloads in multiple public clouds, although yet 86 percent of respondents find they cannot get a global view of cloud costs within minutes.
Thus serves to create delays and potentially reducing agility. The obstruction of visibility was stated by 71 prevent of respondents who felt that limited visibility across the hybrid cloud environment hinders their ability to maximize value, creates inefficiencies, and wastes time.
Lack of visibility was also borne out by 66 percent of respondents who stated it is hard to understand if they are delivering the service levels the business needs. Meanwhile, 65 percent agreed that when there is an issue, they felt hard-pressed to identify the business impact.
Based on the poll, there is little indication that the pressure on cloud teams will begin to subside. Some options that could redress this include single modular platforms for de-risking cloud migrations.
