Businesses are in the dark on cloud costs and usage
Whilst there are increasing levels of trust in running critical applications in the public cloud, many organizations struggle when it comes to providing details of their cloud costs and consumption.
This is according to a survey for analytics specialist Cloud Cruiser, carried out by Dimensional Research, which interviewed almost 350 IT professionals who attended the Amazon Web Services re:Invent shows in 2014 and 2015.
It finds that 85 percent of respondents believe it's valuable to share cloud consumption metrics with the business. Unfortunately, 42 percent continue to find it difficult to properly allocate public cloud usage and costs.
"The public cloud is delivering measurable business benefits as companies find ways to manage and mitigate security and compliance requirements. This drives more organizations to place business applications in the cloud, expanding public cloud usage beyond development and test to that of a flexible business asset," says David Gehringer, Principal, Dimensional Research. "However, IT is expected to provide reliable services and ensure cost transparency so the business can make fact-based decisions about the ROI on services. In 2016, we expect to see more business applications in the cloud and an increased focus on cost transparency comparing those of internal resources and external public cloud services".
In the past the public cloud has been used mainly for sandboxing and development. The survey shows that this is still the case, with 62 percent of respondents using it for this in 2015, but use for enterprise applications is growing and has increased from 38 percent last year to 46 percent this year.
Plans to use alternative clouds are also down. In 2014 only 27 percent planned to use no other cloud apart from AWS, this figure is up to 43 percent in 2015.
More information on the survey and on how businesses can take better control of their cloud usage is available on the Cloud Cruiser website.
Image Credit: Brian A Jackson / Shutterstock