Densify has published findings from a survey of cloud infrastructure professionals across global enterprise organisations. The survey revealed that, while the majority of organisations have budgeted spend for public cloud, most don’t know how much their company spends monthly on these services. With most organisations using Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure for their public cloud needs, half of respondents indicated they don’t know how to handle the frequent technology and pricing changes released by these providers.
With a focus on cutting cloud costs at its core, Densify fully understands the latest cloud provider technologies and prices. The company combines customer cloud workload usage patterns with its machine-learning analytics and proactively aligns customer needs with public cloud resources to recommend what changes to make and results to expect. For many organisations, as priorities arise and IT teams become overloaded, manual cloud optimisation and alignment of cloud resource needs with budget becomes too complex and is often pushed aside. In fact, Densify’s survey shows that about one-fourth of respondents don’t audit (or don’t know if their organisation audits) their cloud usage and costs, and only 20 per cent use some sort of automation tool to optimise infrastructure needs.
“In a market with very few major cloud providers, customers don’t have many choices and simply continue to pay their high cloud bills without a second thought,” said Yama Habibzai, Chief Marketing Officer of Densify. “We’ve helped hundreds of companies optimise their clouds, with major reductions in their cloud bill, so we know that they are overspending.”
Organisations think they are in control
The survey findings highlight the major issue with the cloud market: organisations are flying blind and paying their cloud bills without an understanding of how they are using or paying for the technologies. And yet cloud vendors have 50 per cent of respondents convinced that this is normal. Key findings include:
- Seventy-five per cent overspend relative to their budget, or they simply don’t know how much they are spending.
- Only 50 per cent believe that they are being charged the right amount for what they get in return.
But they are still trusting cloud providers more than they should
Very few respondents (five per cent) distrust their cloud providers, likely because they don’t know how to handle the complexity of these technologies themselves. In a world where the most critical enterprises like airlines and hospitals rely heavily on the cloud, the people that manage it admit that they don’t have confidence in themselves. Additional findings include:
- Thirty per cent admit to not being well prepared to handle the technologies.
- Fifty per cent believe that they need automation to handle the vast complexity of their cloud and 70 per cent admit to not having any optimisation capabilities.
Because cloud providers provide value in the form of new technologies that are constantly released, automation is becoming a critical need for the market as a whole. Companies like Densify are delivering automation to help organisations use the latest technologies aligned with their usage and their cloud budget, without impacting their application performance.
