Companies are facing unexpected costs related to cloud usage. With the rise of the FinOps discipline, there are ways to address overcharges, but figures show that it is still difficult to get control over cloud expenses.
This is according to Dutch research figures of Info Support, among IT professionals from the financial services, healthcare, public sector, manufacturing, logistics, retail, telecommunications and energy and utilities sectors. According to 44 per cent of Dutch IT professionals, an effective solution to monitor and manage costs is currently lacking.
If companies do not manage cloud costs, they may incur budget overruns and inefficient use of cloud resources. For example, the cloud may keep certain services on the air while those services are not used much, if at all, within the company. These types of unnecessary costs can have a major impact on an organization. If the budget is exceeded, other IT projects may be cut.
An interesting outcome of the study is that it provides insight into which cloud vendors Dutch companies use. Microsoft Azure leads the list with a 36 per cent adoption rate. This is followed by Google Cloud Platform (28 per cent), IBM Cloud (19 per cent), Oracle Cloud (19 per cent) and AWS (15 per cent). This is notable in comparison to global usage, as AWS is the largest global cloud vendor, followed by Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
Other challenges
When looking at other challenges companies face with cloud use, ensuring data security and privacy concerns score highest at 29 per cent. Close behind are a lack of internal expertise and skills (26 per cent), integration issues with existing systems and applications (25 per cent), cost control and budget overruns (23 per cent) and the complexity of migration processes (22 per cent).