Dive Brief:
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Nearly 40% of CIOs adopt the cloud for its cost savings and its ability to scale resources based on application and workload demands, according to a 451 Research report. The lower cost enables developers and administrators to "spin up resources" for new applications without having to "justify tight controls."
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However, after adoption is completed, a little more than half of CIOs agree that the budget allocated to the cloud is of top concern, followed by security. The increase in cost can be traced to the spike in consumption after limits are typically ignored. Part of this is from "over-provisioned" resources that are stored for "just in case" purposes that take up additional bandwidth, according to the report.
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Administrators can get creative with cloud spend by leveraging alternative pricing models such as AWS spot instances, Microsoft's enterprise agreements or Google's sustained-use pricing models.
451 Research
Dive Insight:
Adopting the cloud is an issue many companies are still mulling despite the technology's proven benefits. Though the cloud can optimize nearly every aspect of business, usage mismanagement can lead to cost overruns.
Because the cloud can elicit freedom in terms of consumption, proper governance can fall by the wayside. Typically unforeseen costs can be avoided if a third-party reporting tool or consumption hierarchy is in place to oversee an individual's rate of data use.
Confidence in cloud capabilities is rising for tech executives because moving beyond hardware is a strategic decision that has the potential to impact all other aspects of business. The cloud enables IT nimbleness that was unattainable before.
For those still reluctant to fully dive into cloud-based services, the migration is not as cumbersome as perceived. Hybrid cloud options are most common because they provide management capabilities which include initial application migration.
While the costs of switching applications that are already in use is unavoidable, they are most concentrated in rebuilding the application and less so in moving the application from one place to another, according to the report.
