30% of Cloud Spending is Wasted

As much as 30 percent of cloud computing spending is wasted, a 2020 study by Flexera found. confirms the figure, noting that “61 percent of organizations plan to optimize cloud costs in 2021, making it the top initiative for the fifth year in a row.”

Some 55 percent of respondents say understanding the cost implications of software licenses is a top cloud challenge, as well. Users are leveraging automated policies to shut down workloads after hours (49 percent) and rightsize instances (48 percent), says Flexera. 

While as-you-use-it, consumption-based pricing has the potential to be more cost-effective than on-premises infrastructure strategies, organizations that plan poorly and fail to properly monitor their cloud environments can quickly see costs spiraling out of control, says Splunk. 

The primary issue often relates to poor visibility into how cloud instances and services are used, Splunk says. Many organizations allow decentralized groups to procure and manage their own cloud environments. 

While this strategy gives these individuals or teams the autonomy needed to experiment and tailor the environment to their needs, it also leads to significant gaps in oversight, Splunk notes. Services may be overprovisioned, licenses may go unused, and cloud servers may be unnecessarily duplicated. 

None of that is likely to slow the shift to cloud computing, though it will increase the attention paid to rationalizing cloud purchases.