Dive Brief:

• Even though cloud providers often compete on price, public cloud services costs have either stayed the same or gone up over the last year, a new report from UBS Group AG found.

• UBS Group AG found more than 50% of the enterprise IT leaders surveyed said their cloud costs stayed the same, while 15% said costs went up.

• Savings can increase over time, however. Approximately 33% of longtime cloud users said they saw costs decrease more than 40% two years after adopting cloud services, according to the study.

Dive Insight:

When looking into a public cloud deal, CIOs and technology managers should evaluate the pricing terms and avoid signing up for a short term deal that could leave them paying more later.

Eric Sheridan, managing director of internet and interactive entertainment at UBS, said vendors are increasingly bundling more products and services together under their cloud offerings, and that’s preventing costs from going down.

The survey of over 500 enterprise IT decision-makers from a range of industries found that even when price cuts are offered, they aren’t always what they seem, and are often used by cloud providers simply to entice new business.

Dave Bartoletti, principal analyst at Forrester Research, said even if prices were to drop, companies always run the risk of running up costs on cloud services.

"Public cloud is almost always cheaper than running infrastructure yourself, if you shut things off, buy in advance when you can, and make sure the apps you run in cloud can actually take advantage of pay-per-use, elastic cloud economics and pricing models," Bartoletti said.