What are the top challenges you face in managing cloud spending? And how do you expect those might change in the year ahead?

Cloud Cost Optimization IT Strategy & Roadmap

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Senior Executive Advisor in Software9 months ago

One of the things that we see, especially when we're working with a lot of customers, is there is an immense amount of challenge with visibility and control. That's the number one key problem that a lot of people have. Leaders often lack that comprehensive visibility into the cloud usage across their various teams and departments.This is accelerating even more because of shadow IT. They can spin up cloud instances using their credit cards without having to go through established processes. Sometimes we as leaders don't even know the real costs and usage.

It's only going to get worse, especially with everyone playing around with generative AI and AGI. There's going to be a lot of difficulty if we do not manage that visibility and control. I see that as one of the top challenges right now in managing my cloud spend.

Director of Systems Operations in Healthcare and Biotech9 months ago

Lack of visibility is definitely a challenge, but another thing that adds to the mix is many teams don't understand the difference between cloud spend and on-premise spend. A lot of organizations have been used to just spinning things up and it disappears into the ether and they're surprised when they see the bill. And then there's the strategy part. There are tools that can help manage the cloud spend and alert and prevent things, but because of the urgency and the speed and ease of the cloud, a lot of organizations don't take the time to properly plan out and budget their cloud environment. This leaves the IT side trying to catch up.

Director of IT in Consumer Goods9 months ago

I’ll also add that the whole proliferation of data and the lack of an archival strategy just continues to increase your storage and compute costs. So if you're not managing and keeping a lid on what is in your productive environment versus your archive environment, you're just going to see your cost continuously grow and grow and grow.

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Chief Information Technology Officer in IT Services9 months ago

We ran into a challenge when we migrated to the cloud. We were kind of used to over-provisioning resources, just like we did when we were working with on-premises data centers. Back then, we didn't really care much about who was using what and how many resources we had. But once you're in the cloud, you get a reality check in the form of your costs. So, some things were a bit surprising.

When you listen to your provider or clients, they tend to ask for bigger infrastructures than they actually need, just in case. And if you do a one-to-one migration, you might get a shock when you see the bill at the end of the month. Now, we get billed every month, and it's a way for us to keep our costs in check. For me, it's much more manageable. I have an analysis that tracks our billing, and it's become a regular thing, unlike before when we had annual billing. This way, it's easier to spot where we're spending too much on things we don't really use.

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Director of Systems Operations in Healthcare and Biotech9 months ago

Also the cloud is so vast, depending on which platform you select there's an abundance of different services available, and often, the user is in the dark about the costs associated with using those services. This, to me, is another extreme challenge.

Take AWS, for example; they have a multitude of services. Azure and Google are in the same boat. For someone who doesn't spend their time in IT, it's not only about understanding how these processes work but also figuring out how much they're going to cost the organization.

Senior Executive Advisor in Software9 months ago

I'd love to add on to that point because cloud models can be pretty complex, and each one is different. Every public IAS provider has their own different way of billing things. But here's another tricky part: when a development team is working on an application or some workload in the cloud, they often don't test it at scale. So, they have no idea how "chatty" it's going to be or how much it's going to interact with various components. Before you know it, you get sticker shock and it just balloons out of control. Predicting the behavior of all these applications they're developing is another real challenge for teams.

Director of Architecture and IT Infrastructure & Help-Desk Support in Banking9 months ago

We faced the challenges of cloud IT costs very carefully because the dilemma of budget control was very different from our on-premises data center. We started by analyzing all the available resources that could be used to lower the recurrent costs of capabilities that would be there for years. Additionally, we invest with regular reviews of current resources used in the cloud and review application owners' need to calibrate the usage of hardware resources for instance. However one of the challenges that we are currently trying to manage is the usage of storage in every layer of the system architecture, which seems to be very difficult to control and create rules to decrease or stabilize the consumption of resources.
But, if you don't implement a regular review of current cloud resources usage and check options to lower the costs, you will end up with the complex task of managing IT budget costs.