Learning cloud cost management the hard way

The rapid adoption of cloud technologies has outpaced the development of requisite skills within many organizations, leading to inefficiencies in provisioning, managing, and optimizing cloud resources. The No. 1 excuse that I hear from those overspending on cloud computing is that they can’t find the help they need to maximize cloud resources. They are kicking years of cloud-powered technical debt down the road, hoping that someone or some tool will come along to fix everything. Not likely.

Foundational to this issue is that many organizations adopt a “better safe than sorry” approach, allocating more cloud resources than needed. Although this prevents potential performance issues and outages due to running out of resources, it significantly drives up costs. Resources that are provisioned but not fully utilized contribute to wasteful spending. These idle resources often go unnoticed and continue to incur expenses.

This is cloud spending 101, but it’s surprising how many enterprises still make this mistake. More frustrating is that most know they are doing it but really don’t have a better solution than just tossing money at the cloud. Cloud providers have been a bit complicit and promote overuse by not showing their customers how to optimize and correctly size resources. In many instances, resources are overprovisioned due to cloud provider recommendations.