Not All Companies Think They Spend Well
It’s no surprise that cloud spending is big money. But survey respondents report about 30 percent of cloud spend wasted. While companies have automated some policies to reduce cloud costs—some policies with the highest share of automation are shutting down workloads after hours and right-sizing instances—others still require manual labor. The highest share of manual labor is for using the lowest-cost cloud, using the lowest-cost region and software license compliance.
Part of the issue is customers missing out on available discounts from vendors. About half of AWS and Azure users take advantage of the vendors’ reserved instances discounts. AWS’ Savings Plan, introduced in 2020, grew in use from 30 percent last year to 44 percent this year.
The industry has also seen cloud spending tools arise to help mitigate the problem including one from Ternary, a San Francisco-based startup offering what it’s billing as the first native cloud financial management tool built for Google Cloud.
