Cloud Cost Overruns

How Much is Too Much?

Just Blame It on COVID-19 (or Not!)

A lot can be laid at the doorstep of the pandemic. When it comes to enterprise cloud investment, specifically, Network World also reports many organizations accelerated their own cloud migrations due to the impact of COVID-19.

But the issue of cloud overspend was around well before most of us ever heard about PPE.

For the fifth year running, the Flexera 2021 State of the Cloud Report, cites the need to optimize cloud spend as survey respondents’ top cloud initiative.

Just Blame It on COVID-19 (or Not!)

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Flexera’s report offers good insight on amount of overspend, too. When asked how much of their overall cloud bill they thought was “wasted spend,” organizations estimated their wasted spend at 30 percent of their bill. By Flexera’s own account, however, actual wasted spend tends to be closer to 35 percent (and up) of an organization’s bill!

Granted, Chief Cloud Economist Corey Quinn of The Duckbill Group claims your cloud bill may not actually be too high. It may be more that your current cloud bill is “unattributable and unpredictable.” He makes a good point.

Cloud bills perceived as too high may be due to the organization’s inability to attribute their expense to one or more business value metrics. Getting to this level of attribution, cost targeting, and reporting, however, also can’t happen overnight. We’ll touch more on these fundamental topics later.

For now, we’ll start with a focus on more immediate, quick wins.