Cloud Cruiser has published the results of a survey conducted at the recent Microsoft Ignite conference in Atlanta, Georgia that has revealed there is a clear need for solutions that allow SMBs and enterprises to meter cloud usage and analyze their consumption of cloud resources across the entire business.
The survey was conducted on more than 100 IT and cloud business professionals from organizations around the world. 80% of respondents said they are currently using or planning to use hybrid cloud services.
One of the key findings of the survey is the difficulty organizations have with monitoring and controlling their cloud costs. It is now easy to create new virtual machines to meet business needs, but doing so incurs a cost, even when those VMs are not being used. Unless businesses have full visibility into cloud usage across the entire organization, it is inevitable that there will be underutilized resources and overprovisioning.
63% of respondents said they had difficulty tracking and managing cloud usage across the entire organization and struggled to allocate cloud consumption. A previous survey conducted just three months ago indicated only a third of businesses were experiencing problems in this area – a jump of one third in just three months.
This can be explained, in part, by the rapid increase in usage of the cloud. 42% of businesses said they are now running 10% of their workloads in the cloud and 25% said they run more than 25% of workloads in the cloud. While the cloud offers many benefits over on-premises IT for certain workloads, the potential for inefficient use of the cloud is considerable.
According to Cloud Cruiser, there has been average growth of 35% across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, yet while cloud adoption is growing at a considerable rate, many organizations are not carefully monitoring where their cloud spend is going and there is little visibility into how resources are being used. While cloud cost monitoring and analysis of usage was once considered to be a capability that would be nice to have, it is now essential. If costs are not carefully controlled it negatively impacts the pace of adoption, productivity, and could well erode an organization’s competitive advantage.
76% of respondents said they would like to be able to reduce their overall cloud spend, 47% said they needed a solution that would allow them to monitor and optimize cloud services and maximize their ROI, while 36% said they needed a solution that would allow them to better forecast future cloud usage to plan capacity more effectively.
