Almost half of businesses are struggling with cloud costs

A new report published today by business monitoring firm Anodot reveals 49 percent of businesses find it difficult to get cloud costs under control, and 54 percent believe their primary source of cloud waste is a lack of visibility into cloud usage.

The report, based on a survey of over 130 US-based IT directors and executives, shows 91 percent of respondents report they currently have IT infrastructure in the cloud, while 60 percent say that migrating more workloads to the cloud is their top cloud initiative in the coming year.

As enterprises continue to face high monthly cloud bills -- with cloud costs ranking second only to payroll in terms of business expenses for some -- visualizing costs, optimizing spend and reducing wasted spend are becoming top priorities.

The problem is 44 percent of respondents say that at least a third of their cloud spend is wasted each year. Visibility is the main culprit: the majority of executives surveyed (53 percent) say gaining visibility into cloud usage and costs is their top challenge for controlling spend and reducing waste; 19 percent say they lack the ability to manage their cloud budget due to insufficient visibility into cloud usage. Cloud costs are also becoming increasingly complex to track and understand, also leading to misspending; 46 percent of executives report that overprovisioning is a primary source of cloud waste, while 45 percent blame cloud assets' fragmentation across teams and vendors.

"Shifting to the cloud requires a delicate balance between the speed of workload migration and cost control," says David Drai, Anodot's CEO and co-founder. "Today, cloud cost management -- which is all the more crucial as businesses strive to mitigate wasted resources and shore up revenues -- should be based on four key elements: visibility, insights, recommendations, and automated actions. Enterprises that are leveraging AI and ML to control and optimize their cloud environments are seeing immediate results and reduced waste, unlocking the true value the cloud has always promised."

The 2021 State of Cloud Cost Report is available from the Anodot site.

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