Many businesses are spending too much on cloud services, potentially wasting millions of dollars each year, according to new research.
Couchbase found that with the typical company spending more than €33 million per year on cloud services and spending 35% more than necessary, many are losing more than €8,75 million that could be saved or spent elsewhere. .
The company spoke to 650 IT decision makers about their experience with cloud storage and cloud adoption, attributing cost overruns to a variety of factors.
What drives excessive spending?
These included not having enough insight into spending or ways to optimize costs, the need for enhanced security and compliance features, and rigid pricing plans that don't give businesses what they need in one package.
Additionally, Couchbase pointed out management tools that don't provide the necessary control; data is not stored where it is needed to meet regulatory or performance requirements; and vendor lock-in, which means companies can't use the specific cloud infrastructure they want.
The cloud puzzles
The research also highlighted problems with cloud computing in general.
More than a third (36%) of companies said cloud services adopted in the last three years fell short of expectations, while 56% said previous cloud decisions had hindered digital transformation plans in 2021 and had made them 48% more expensive.
Businesses are fighting service throttling according to Couchbase.
The majority (61%) of companies had to scale back their digital transformation ambitions due to challenges with cloud services, while 58% chose cloud services that did not scale the business to meet demand.
When asked to identify their top concerns with new cloud infrastructure, 43% of respondents identified data security, followed by cloud data management (33%) and future readiness to meet future digital needs (31%), while 30% are concerned about controlling costs in the future.
Yet despite these issues, 95% of companies surveyed said a further infrastructure shift to the cloud was "inevitable."
By 2025, companies want 58% of their IT spending to be in the public cloud and say they are currently more than half (56%) away from achieving this goal.