35 percent of cloud spend is wasted through inefficiency

In the dash to the cloud it's easy to lose sight of the fact that it isn't necessarily always the answer to spending your IT budget in the most efficient way.

New data released by cloud management company RightScale reveals that cloud users could reduce their spend by an average of 35 percent by making better use of resources.

Based on three months of data from RightScale's Cloud Cost Optimization Service it finds that compute resources represent 76 percent of cloud spend and database services account for only 15 percent.

Cloud spending continues to rise overall, up 76 percent from the beginning of the year, making it critical for enterprises to optimize their expenditure. The findings show that enterprises continue to run the majority of instances 24x7 which can be a source of waste. On average, there's only 31 percent variability between the highest and lowest number of instances running over a month. RightScale says enterprises should implement auto scaling for production workloads as well as automated scheduling for development environments so that they run only during working hours or when needed.

Over-provisioning is a problem too, 39 percent of instance spend is on VMs that are running at under 40 percent of CPU and memory utilization, with the majority of those running under 20 percent utilization. This represents an opportunity to downsize and significantly reduce costs. Many enterprises also neglect to clean up storage that is no longer being used, resulting in seven percent of all cloud spend being wasted on unattached storage volumes and old snapshots.

"RightScale works closely with its enterprise customers to leverage the RightScale platform as well as our deep experience optimizing cloud usage," says Kim Weins, vice president of marketing at RightScale. "We reviewed data from our recent cost optimization projects and found that cloud users can reduce their cloud spend on average by 35 percent. By leveraging all the power of the RightScale platform, customers can identify waste, take automated action, and implement policies to prevent waste going forward".

You can read more about the findings on the RightScale blog.

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