Cloud spending has become a critical performance indicator for data teams
Cloud spending is now a critical KPI for the majority of data teams, according to a new report. Almost 80 percent of business stakeholders say cloud spending is a critical KPI while 55 percent of data practitioners say the same.
The study, from data observability platform Unravel Data, surveyed 350 data professionals at the Data Teams Summit event earlier this year and shows that in addition to cloud spending being elevated as a top KPI, 44 percent report that they believe that they are leaving money on the table when it comes to their public cloud utilization.
Alarmingly, almost a quarter of respondents (23 percent) say they are unable to even estimate what percentage of their cloud resources went unused.
"For the third year in a row we've had the opportunity to take the pulse of enterprise data teams to better understand the daily challenges they face as they accelerate their ambitious big data analytics programs," says Kunal Agarwal, co-founder and CEO of Unravel Data. "In just the course of a year we've seen a significant shift in how these growing, cross-functional teams are prioritizing DataOps as an established discipline across their organizations in a similar way that DevOps became an entrenched practice among software teams a decade ago. But despite this progress, this year's survey also demonstrates that issues like FinOps, cloud utilization, and data security continue to present unique challenges to data teams."
Among other findings, more than 44 percent of respondents report they are actively employing DataOps methodologies, compared to just 21 percent in 2022, representing a 110 percent increase from the previous year. Further demonstrating the maturing DataOps practice, only 20 percent of respondents in this year’s survey say they are at the beginning stage compared to 41 percent last year.
Data reliability remains a top challenge. When participants are asked what they viewed as the top challenge with operating their data stack, 41 percent cite the lack of data quality as their most significant obstacle while 35 percent note that the lack of visibility across their environments is the second biggest obstacle to managing their data stack.
Recordings of the Data Teams Summit sessions are available here.
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