How organizations can optimize cloud spend

Although 80% organizations recognize cloud computing as being vital to their financial security, 57% have encountered unexpected costs, according to a study from Aptum.

80% IT professionals see success in utilizing cloud services to unlock greater business profitability. The agility of cloud deployments allows organizations to quickly scale their services to support demand, release new products or services to market, and subsequently improve profit margins and increase efficiencies. In fact, increased efficiency is a common driver behind cloud computing for 72% of respondents.

The overall efficiency and flexibility of cloud allows organizations to only pay for what they use, increasing overall profitability, which is cited by 39% of respondents as a motivator behind cloud adoption.

Unexpected cloud spend a key challenge

However, as organizations migrate workloads to different cloud platforms, visibility and control into cloud environments becomes difficult to achieve, often leading to unforeseen costs – a key challenge for 81% of respondents.

Without necessary insights to evaluate performance and enforce remedial measures for issues, the efficiency of cloud becomes hard to manage. This is the case for 57% of respondents who say cloud has resulted in unanticipated costs, and 35% of respondents who admit they are wasting IT spend due to the inefficient use of cloud platforms.

“The greater operational efficiency and flexibility that cloud promises can grant organizations opportunities to unlock new performance capabilities and help cut costs,” Leigh Plumley, Chief Revenue Officer at Aptum, explains. “But most businesses don’t have the in-house expertise to effectively specialise and manage a range of environments and stay current with the rate of change in technologies.”

A difficult journey to the cloud

“Organizations increasingly find that the journey to cloud is not always a straight path. Cloud adoption comes with a learning curve and it is often difficult to address these challenges with existing internal IT resources,” states Philbert Shih, Managing Director at Structure Research.

“This has created healthy demand for MSPs and infrastructure service providers to help manage and optimize cloud usage on behalf of mid-tier and large enterprise organizations. Service providers have established economies of expertise through repeated trials and operational scale. And they are able to package all this know-how into a consumable service that end users can benefit from on day one.”

The data suggests that cloud deployments without expert guidance from a Managed Service Partner (MSP) can increase associated costs if cloud optimization is not a fundamental principle from the start.

Taking a holistic approach to cloud infrastructures, where visibility and control are embedded from design, can ensure costs are optimized and the service runs at maximum efficiency.

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