Spinning up that AWS or Azure instance at the snap of a finger may be a beautiful thing to behold, but sometimes the application, testbed or whatever it may be gets abandoned and forgotten -- but still appears on monthly bills, along with all the other spun-up but not powered-down services. Or, on the opposite extreme, a cloud service becomes very popular and well-used, to the point in which it is gobbling gigabytes upon gigabytes of data or activity -- and causing unanticipated spikes in monthly bills.
Photo: Joe McKendrickOn the outset, the low-hanging fruit of cloud migration was the purported cost savings seen through switching from a front-loaded licensing model to a month-by-month subscription approach, which certainly looked good on balance sheets from a CapEx perspective. Now, however, as cloud catches on across enterprises, taking up the work of many business functions, many chief financial officers as well as CIOs are gasping at the unexpected expenses seen in their monthly bills.
That's the word from the authors of a recent survey[1] of 300 IT executives from SoftwareONE, a software and cloud management provider, which finds that while cloud adoption continues to rise, organizations struggle to understand and balance the burgeoning technology with their existing on-premises solutions. There is also the challenge of keeping a lid on cloud costs, which in some organizations is giving CFOs sticker shock on a month-by-month basis.
That ongoing sticker shock tops the list of cloud pain points, the survey shows -- 37 percent of organizations listing unpredictable costs as a top issue. Add to that the lack of visibility into cloud resource usage - something nearly one-third of companies struggle with. As services get gobbled up, the meter keeps running.
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