In the first few years of cloud computing, cost savings was the driving reason for adopting cloud. Nowadays, however, businesses are faced with spiraling cloud costs. There's even a word for the emerging process to deal with it: "FinOps."
Organizations continue to waste significant cloud spend, according to Flexera's recently released 2022 State of the Cloud Report[1], based on survey responses from 753 global cloud decision-makers and users. Sixty-six percent of executives said cloud usage is "higher than initially planned this year," They estimated that their organizations waste 32% of cloud spend, up from 30% in last year's survey.
In addition, "spend is likely less efficient and likely even higher on average, as many organizations tend to underestimate their amount of waste," the survey's authors report. In addition, respondents reported their public cloud spend was over budget by an average of 13% for the previous year. They expect their cloud spend to further increase by 29% in the next twelve months.
Among small to medium businesses, 53% are now spending $1.2 million annually on cloud computing, up from 38 percent in 2021. While the survey's authors do not provide a similar composite spending figure for larger enterprises, they report that many spend $12 million or more annually on selected public cloud services -- 18% of enterprises spend this on AWS, 15% spend this on Microsoft Azure, and seven percent on Google Cloud Platform.
So there is a lot of money being poured into cloud services. It's likely that a lot of the monthly subscription bills are going to a raft of unused or underused services for which no one is really able to account. Someone in some department signed on to a cloud instance to run some tests three years ago, abandoned it,