Enterprise cloud costs up over 90 percent in the past year

Cloud costs are a measure of the services businesses are using, but they also reflect the wider market and the pricing strategies of providers.

Cloud native service provider Civo has carried out a survey into what businesses are spending on cloud and finds that enterprise cloud costs have risen by 93 percent on average in the past year.

Smaller businesses are suffering too, with SMBs reporting an average increase in cloud costs of 48 percent in the past year. Civo's research reveals that month-by-month, this means SMBs are spending an average of $5,600 per month on cloud deployments.

Of the 1,000 developers questioned for the survey, 59 percent say the reason for their growing cloud costs was adding new services and solutions to the cloud. This exceeds the role played by both the need to scale usage of the cloud (51 percent) and firms experiencing higher traffic on their servers (45 percent).

"For too long, many in the industry have assumed that growth in costs reflected scaling existing deployments or increased traffic to a site," says Mark Boost, CEO of Civo. "Our research demonstrates that this is not the case. Users are being overwhelmed with a steady stream of new services and solutions, ensuring expenses continue to ratchet up for customers. This is to say nothing for the security concerns created by managing this plethora of moving parts, and the inevitable hit on user experience."

The research finds 77 percent of organizations have one of the big three (AWS, Azure or Google Cloud) as their main provider. Whilst users experience growing cloud costs, these hyperscalers are seeing soaring profits. Microsoft recently reported Q3 earnings that beat analyst expectations, fuelled by revenues of $23.4 billion in the firm’s cloud unit -- up 32 percent year-on-year.

Boost adds, "We need to see urgent action to address these problems. Transparency must become the new watchword of cloud computing, with providers focusing on cutting through the complexity and prioritizing reliable, super-fast launch times -- all for a fair price. The time to act is now. Developers deserve better."

The full research is available on the Civo site.

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