Cloud adoption is on the rise, but cloud waste is a major challenge

Cloud computing today has become a business phenomenon. Cloud adoption is reaching heights day by day. The global public cloud spending is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of 6.3% from US$242.7 billion in 2019 to US$257.9 billion in 2020, according to Gartner. In Q2 2020 alone, global cloud infrastructure spending grew 31% to $34.6 billion, Canalys' quarterly report claimed. However, in all this, if organizations don't have effective management in their cloud use, they can lose huge money leading their cloud efforts to waste.

Cloud waste is a critical challenge for companies utilizing cloud services. As more and more businesses shift to the cloud, cloud waste will also grow. According to a self-service SaaS platform provider ParkMyCloud, cloud waste resulted in business losses of US$14.1 billion in 2019 alone. The major reasons behind cloud waste are oversized resources, idle run-time, and excessive centralization.

Thus, how to avoid cloud waste to power business performance?

Capacity Estimation – Businesses must have plans and strategies for their capacity needs. They need to evaluate their resource usage. This will allow them to add capacity gradually rather than buying resources in bulk for both the growing business and the cloud environment. Organizations also need to ensure their IT teams, developers, and customers' requirements.

Auditing – Cloud infrastructure supports some of the most integral aspects of a business. By reviewing, auditing and optimizing their cloud infrastructure, businesses can scribble down assets, spends, and capacity measures to prevent unnecessary expenditure. This will enable them to gain better financial control and accomplish greater visibility over their cloud infrastructure.

Skillset – Having germane knowledge and skillsets within IT teams is indispensable for tackling cloud waste. Both organizations and employees need to comprehend the difference between legacy infrastructure and cloud systems to avoid making extravagant mistakes. As most businesses still use legacy systems, they explore and contribute devotedly to the current IT ecosystem. Hence, there is a need to focus on advanced and evolving cloud skills, with existing experience and technical know-how.

Auto-Scaling – Leveraging intelligent platforms can allow companies' resources to auto-scaling. They must get their capacity automatically allocated and released during workload fluctuations. For organizations that deal with large workloads regularly, it is essential to maintain multiple environments so that they can auto-scale only those capacities that cater to services during peak load.

Moreover, foresighted enterprises have significantly identified the potential of cloud services to their digital transformation endeavour. The outbreak of COVID-19 has also accelerated the significance of the cloud and propelled businesses to become more agile. Since cloud waste is becoming more inevitable and proving to be a major obstacle for technical and business decision-makers, companies will waste US$17.6 billion in cloud spend on idle and excess resources in 2020. Other sources that lead to waste include orphaned volumes, inept containerization, underutilized databases, instances running on legacy resource types, and unused reserved instances, among others.

Some reports also show that organizations struggle to avoid cloud waste mainly due to lack of enforcement around provisioning practices and limited visibility and tracking to de-provision resources. Despite this, the growth in cloud spending is predicted to exceed across diverse business aspects as companies are continuously making a shift to the cloud.