Organizations fail in the cloud economy and overspend on the cloud

Virtualization, the main precursor of cloud computing, gained popularity in the early 2000s because businesses had too many servers running at low usage levels. According to conventional thought, every box needed a backup, and underutilization was preferable to using all available computing power and running the danger of overload.

Due to the enormous amounts of time and resources wasted on maintaining all this hardware, corporations eventually consolidated their data centers using virtual machines. These virtual machines started moving off-site to different clouds.

However, old habits are difficult to break. Cloud installations also exhibit the same server sprawl that affected physical data centers 15 years ago.

Virtual machine (VM) instances over-provisioned, and under-optimized squander cloud resources. Most businesses run their virtual instances 24 hours a day, seven days a week, using less than 40% of their CPU and memory. At the same time, cloud storage capacities are clogged by outdated backup snapshots and other unconnected data stores. It appears that the cloud's simplicity and adaptability have two sides.

94% of enterprises are overspending on the cloud

According to a recent Forrester analysis, most businesses surveyed globally are overspending on the cloud.

Over 1,000 IT decision-makers from North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific participated in the survey, and 94% of respondents said their companies had significant, avoidable cloud expenses because of a variety of factors, including under- and over-provisioned resources and a lack of skills to use cloud infrastructure.

According to the survey, underutilizing resources was among the main causes of overspending, with more than 66% of respondents citing it. Overprovisioning resources came in second, with 59% of respondents citing it, and a lack of necessary skills, with 47% of respondents.

37% more respondents cited manual containerization as a factor in cloud overspending. Nearly 60% of respondents claimed to be using multicloud infrastructures, and another 21% stated they would be switching to one in the upcoming 12 months. According to the research, most businesses polled were already utilizing multicloud infrastructures.

Multicloud infrastructure has become widespread

According to the report, 90% of respondents said their businesses succeeded with a multicloud strategy. In comparison, only 53% of poll participants from the previous year claimed that such an approach was effective for them.

This year, reliability was a key factor in the growth of multicloud, with 46% of respondents stating it as their main motivation. This year, digital transformation fell to the second position from first place, with 43% of respondents citing it as the primary motivator for the switch to multicloud.

Scalability, security and governance, and cost-cutting were further reasons influencing the use of multicloud this year.

Nearly 86% of those surveyed said they relied on teams that manage cloud operations and strategy responsible for vital duties, including standardizing cloud services, developing and disseminating best practices and guidelines, and coordinating cloud security and compliance.

The greatest obstacle to implementing multicloud was a lack of skilled workers, as stated by 41% of respondents. Teams operating in silos, compliance, risk management, and a lack of training were a few other obstacles mentioned by respondents.

Additionally, approximately 99% of those surveyed agreed that infrastructure automation is crucial for multicloud operations since it offers faster, more reliable self-service IT infrastructure, greater security, better cloud resource usage, and quicker incident response.

Eighty-nine percent of respondents indicated that security is crucial in multicloud success, and nearly 88 percent stated they already used security automation solutions. Another 83% of respondents stated that they already automate network infrastructure and use infrastructure as code in some capacity.