A survey of 100 vice presidents from organizations with more than 1,000 employees suggests a need for increased visibility into cloud spending. This has become a major opportunity for managed service providers (MSPs) that have cloud expertise. Conducted by Vega Cloud, a provider of a platform for managing multiple clouds, the survey finds 65 percent identify reduced cloud spending as a goal with three quarters (75 percent) looking to cut cloud costs by 10-50 percent in 2023.
Cloud spending exceeds budgets
Overall, nearly half of survey respondents (45 percent) said they have received a surprise in their cloud bills “a number of times” over the past 12 months, with 70 percent of respondents noting these surprises have happened at least a half dozen times in the past year.
A total of 40 percent admitted they had exceeded budgets multiple times in the past year while 38 percent said they had to modify their forecasted cloud spending budget numerous times over the past 12 months.
More than half of respondents (55 percent) said database costs are the metric that matters most when looking at cloud usage. This is closely followed by bandwidth costs (51 percent), storage costs (49 percent) and compute costs (47 percent). Nearly two thirds (64 percent) said they track metrics at least somewhat often, while 46 percent said they have somewhat optimized their cloud use. A total of 11 percent said they’re not optimized at all.
MSPs are looking for ways to minimize costs
The best way to reduce cloud costs identified by survey respondents is to become more informed about what they’re spending (40 percent), followed by consistently optimizing use of cloud resources (33 percent). A total of 61 percent of those respondents identified that Reserved Instances/Savings Plans are the best way to optimize cloud use, while 55 percent said waste elimination followed closely by right-sizing (54 percent).
Among the cloud service providers, Google is cited as doing the most to help customers manage and reduce cloud costs (38 percent), followed by Amazon Web Services (34 percent) and Microsoft (28 percent) but a full 85 percent said they could all be doing more. More than half (52 percent) or respondent also noted they are more closely evaluating service providers options.
Finding the right skill sets is challenging
A full 93 percent also report they have invested at least a fair amount of money on tools to optimize cloud costs, with 82 percent having invested in FinOps staff or people with FinOps experience. The challenge is that 70 percent of respondents said it was difficult to find people with these skill sets, the survey finds. A full 88 percent also noted they are also using artificial intelligence (AI) at least somewhat to optimize cloud use and costs.
A downturn in the economy is, of course, the major reason organizations are looking to rein in cloud costs after years of limited oversight. Well over half of respondents (56 percent) said they are concerned about the economy, and 95 percent of those respondents said those concerns have, at least somewhat, impacted their IT strategy.
By and large, the challenge organizations face is limited to no visibility into cloud spending before a monthly bill arrives. Unfortunately, not many of them are currently relying on MSPs to help them manage cloud infrastructure, but with a little more focus on what has clearly become a major pain point, the opportunity for MSPs to play a larger role in the cloud era has never been greater.
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