Dive Brief:

• In an effort that Google says will help customers manage unpredictable data growth and subsequently unexpected cloud bills, Google Cloud unveiled the Storage Growth Plan this week to provide "flexible, read-when-you-need-it data storage" at a more predictable price. 
• The pricing plan allows customers to commit to a minimum of $10,000 per month for the first year of Cloud Storage use, with no extra charges during that time for going above their commitment. After a year, companies can leave the plan and pay for the surplus above their commitment or renew for another year at their peak usage level. 
• If companies recommit and their peak usage was within 30% of their original commitment, Google will waive costs tied to their surplus. If overage is more than 30% above the original commitment, customers are responsible for costs tied to the remainder. 

Dive Insight:

The volume and velocity of data intake is increasing for most businesses, leaving them with gigabytes, terabytes and even petabytes more data than they had a few years ago. The creation of data and its life cycles can be unpredictable, suddenly driving up or down how much data storage or compute power a company needs each month.  

Many businesses are struggling to manage surging cloud costs. Public cloud spend alone is expected to rise by nearly one-quarter this year, but pinpointing the source of those cost hikes can be difficult. 

CFOs evaluating cloud budgets might think costs have exploded, but the complexity of workloads has also increased, according to Abhishek Singh, vice president at the Everest Group, in an interview with CIO Dive. Consideration of this increased complexity and other factors, such as multicloud environments, can make it difficult to figure out what is driving up costs. 

On the one hand, businesses are moving more workloads to the cloud, which will expectedly increase cloud-related costs over time. But lack of visibility in some areas, such as container adoption, is also accumulating more costs for businesses. 

Before businesses move workloads to the cloud, careful financial evaluation is needed to determine whether costs are actually better on the cloud, whether they are getting the right kind of runtime and whether the cloud is secure enough, Singh said. These factors can vary greatly between organizations and segments.