Moving to the cloud saves costs for companies, according to a new survey from Cloudamize, but could be saving more. The results indicate that while there is significant potential in the cloud, most organizations still need to put the right tools in place to provide visibility and ensure that they fully leverage the cost benefits, achieve optimal performance quickly, and avoid extensive experimentation that results in wasted time and money.
Cloudamize, an analytics company, crunched the numbers on more than 77,000 Amazon Web Services instances, and found that 34% of implemented cloud strategies had cost-saving opportunities of 30% or more.
“In exploring the benefits of cloud computing, many organizations are finding that they encounter a significant amount of noise that hinders their decision making,” commented Khushboo Shah, founder and CEO of Cloudamize. “This analysis deciphers the signal from that noise, dispels the myths around the cloud, and enables them to move forward with confidence and efficiency.”
The study also found that nearly 70% of instances did not use the most cost-efficient pricing plan for their workload type and usage pattern. Most users reserve future capacity at the highest reservation level possible in order to realize cost savings through AWS Reserved Instances– and as a result, 76% of instances were not optimally provisioned for their workloads. Further, those over-provisioned workloads had the potential for cost savings of 34% or more.