Network bloat: AI-driven data movements cause cloud overspend

According to a survey released last October by Stacklet, a cloud governance company, half of the companies polled say that 40% or more of their cloud spending is wasted—and the larger the organization, the more wasteful the cloud spending.

There are a lot of reasons for the wasted spending, says Scott Wheeler, cloud practice lead at Asperitas, a cloud consultancy. Many companies, even after all these years, still haven’t adapted to the switch from capital expenses to operating expenses, he says. For example, they might not have a specific individual or group tasked with managing cloud costs.

“Or sometimes the person or group that’s responsible doesn’t have it as their primary responsibility,” Wheeler explains. “They’ll have several other things they’re responsible for, and, oh, by the way, cost is there.”

For instance, a business unit might allocate a certain budget for a project and then, once it’s up and running, nobody ever goes back and checks that the full allocation is still needed. “It’s a hassle to go back and look at it,” Wheeler says.

There are plenty of tools available to monitor costs, data retention policies, misconfigurations, and other cloud issues. “There are tools native to Azure, Google, and AWS,” Wheeler says. “And there are third-party tools for cost management, but sometimes people don’t set these things up.”

One client recently declined to spend $200,000 on a project that would have saved $2 million per year in cloud costs by reducing the amount of logging data that was stored, Wheeler says. “It just wasn’t a priority. Leadership has other things they have to get done.”