Counting the cost of misplaced cloud confidence

A recent survey of 350 IT and cloud decision-makers reveals the challenges enterprises are facing across the hybrid cloud amid disjointed point tools, silos, lack of visibility, unexpected costs, lack of programmatic optimisation, and the role risk plays in cloud cost management. The survey was fielded in the United States and United Kingdom by Arlington Research, and commissioned by Virtana.

Survey findings show that a large majority (82%) of organisations with workloads running in public clouds have incurred “unnecessary” cloud costs. In line with these survey results, Gartner predicts that through 2024, 60% of infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders will encounter public cloud cost overruns that negatively impact their on-premises budgets.

“The pandemic has accelerated organisations’ journey to the cloud,” said Archana Vankatarman, Associate Research Director, Cloud Data Management, IDC Europe. “In fact, a ‘more aggressive move to the cloud’ was cited as the top item on the list of planned changes to the IT strategy as a result of the 2020 crisis, according to IDC’s COVID-19 Impact Survey in 2020.” 

Archana continued, “Public cloud platforms provide enterprises with agile, on-demand, flexible access to resources to align with a digital business’s dynamic needs. But inefficient cloud operations are emerging as a top barrier. The duct-taped point tools and silos can make cloud cost management complex. The belief that they are wasting at least 15% of their public cloud spending will drive enterprises to actively invest in cloud cost management to halve cloud waste.” 

Virtana survey findings underscore the need for IT leaders to address the following areas in order to execute a successful digital transformation:

• Disjointed tools: 72% of respondents said they are fed up piecing together disparate management tools to monitor and manage everything from infrastructure performance to cloud cost and migration readiness. 62% report they cobble together multiple tools, systems, and custom scripts to get a global view of cloud costs.

• Silos: 68% of all respondents stated their teams operate in silos and 70% of respondents said limited collaboration hinders their ability to adapt quickly and improve business outcomes.

• Unexpected costs: 82% of respondents have incurred unnecessary cloud costs, which can eat into budgets needed for other areas of transformation.

• Lack of programmatic cost optimisation: 56% 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.

• Lack of visibility across hybrid and multi-cloud environments: 84% of respondents are running workloads in multiple public clouds yet 86% of respondents said they cannot get a global view of cloud costs within minutes, creating delays and potentially reducing agility. 71% of respondents agreed that limited visibility across the hybrid cloud environment hinders their ability to maximise value, creates inefficiencies, and wastes time.

• Risk and pressure on IT: 66% of respondents stated it is hard to understand if they are delivering the service levels the business needs, and 65% agreed that when there is an issue, they are hard-pressed to identify the business impact. In addition, 77% cited increased performance issues as one of the reasons that pressure on cloud teams continues to rise.

Christina Richards, CMO of Virtana added, “The survey shows that one of the biggest challenges is how to manage workloads operating in the cloud to avoid unexpected costs. While it’s clear that experience makes a difference (see figure 1), so does having a single modular platform for de-risking cloud migrations, having deep precision observability into workloads before, during, and after the move, and optimising and managing efficiently once workloads are in the cloud.”