spending becomes one of the most expensive resources for some organizations, IT, finance and C-suite leaders are prioritizing strategies and tools to optimize cloud spend, reduce waste and centralize cloud cost management. The 2022 State of Cloud Cost Report was compiled after a two-week survey conducted in June and July. As for annual cloud spend, about half of the 131 high-level IT executives surveyed said their companies spend less than $1 million annually on the cloud, while the rest spend more than $1 million. Fifteen percent said they are spending more than $5 million each year. More than half (53 percent) of the Anodot survey respondents say their biggest challenge in controlling costs is in achieving true visibility into their cloud usage and the costs associated with that. This is followed by the complexity of cloud pricing (50 percent) and the use of complex, multi-cloud environments (49 percent). The three issues are related, because it can be difficult to have visibility into every aspect of cloud usage with an associated cost when the environment is complex or stretched across multiple providers’ platforms. And, according to the survey, for companies with a multicloud strategy, managing and optimizing costs across providers is nearly impossible because of proprietary and dissimilar pricing models. So, the challenge of gaining visibility to control cloud costs has given rise to “FinOps,” an evolving cloud financial management discipline that allows organizations to get maximum business value by helping engineering, finance, technology and business teams to collaborate on the company’s datadriven spending decisions. However, even with FinOps, some of the respondents still feel they lack the visibility they need to improve cost management. Because a company’s cloud spending often occurs in siloes spread among different teams and perhaps many third-party cloud providers, communication and budgeting gaps emerge. While controlling cloud costs is a priority for IT executives, nearly half (49 percent) say the process is difficult, citing the lack of visibility into what services are generating costs and how they are allocated as the primary culprits. Optimizing efficiency Businesses with strong visibility can optimize cloud efficiency and spending by knowing what to do to save money. Anodot’s study estimated that a third of cloud spending is wasted by either going unused or underused. This wasted spending tends to raise operational expenses without providing any value. Visibility and the ability to measure cloud waste are critical in achieving meaningful reductions. The study points out that platformnative tools provide organizations analysis of resources running and actual usage, but actionable insight is limited. More than 90 percent of the responding IT executives say they believe cloud waste can be addressed through operational and strategic improvements. They say How important is optimizing spending and reducing the cost of existing cloud services? Source: Anodot ‘2022 State of Cloud Cost Report’ What are your top ch llenges to controlling cloud costs? Source: Anodot ‘2022 State of Cloud Cost Report’ What types of tools do you use to manage and optimize cloud usage? uyer’s journey Content Types 50 60 37% 58% 20% 27% % nal ns Approve purchase Implement/ manage solutions 59% 58% 58% 58% % Source: Spiceworks Very important Extremely important Somewhat important Hardly important 59% 30% 10% 1% Gaining true visibility into cloud usage and costs Complex cloud pricing Complex, multi-cloud environments Lack of centralized cloud governance Resource sprawl due to ease of provisioning 35% 49% 50% 38% 34% 27% 53% 27% Native tools Third-party solution that manages multi-cloud environments Multiple third-party solutions Built our own How important is optimizing spending and reducing the cost of existing cl d services? Source: Anodot ‘2022 State of Cloud Cost Report’ What are your top challenges to controlling cloud costs? Source: Anodot ‘2022 State of C Cost Report’ uyer’s journey 50 60 % 37% 58% 20% 27% 8% inal ons Approve purchase Implement/ manage solutions 59% % 58% 58% 58% 3% ource: Spiceworks than self-hosting Cloud reduces need for specialized expertise Organization prefers capex over opex Organization employs “cloud first” strategy 62% 50% 59% 47% 55% 39% 49% ITDM BDM Very important Extremely important Somewhat important Hardly important 59% 30% 10% 1% Gaining true visibility into cloud usage and costs Complex cloud pricing Complex, multi-cloud environments Lack of centralized cloud governance Resource sprawl due to ease of provisioning 35% 49% 50% 53% 27% BUYERS SIDE 26 CHANNELV ISION | SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2022
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