Visibility is key to optimized cloud infrastructure costs

ESG surveyed IT, DevOps, and AppDev professionals responsible for evaluating, purchasing, managing, and building application infrastructure. Out of 357 professionals, 64% agree that the adoption of public cloud or multiple public cloud providers has made observability significantly more difficult; this increases to 74% for the technology industry.

The survey results highlight a strong need to gain better visibility into cloud costs while reducing the burden to the affected DevOps / IT teams that are responsible for those costs.

The promise of the cloud has always been scalability and flexibility of deployment models, and many organizations have realized those benefits. But as multi-cloud adoption has accelerated – 71% of organizations leverage more than 3 cloud infrastructure providers – it has become significantly more challenging to track, understand, and properly attribute cloud costs to their appropriate teams.

In the survey, 84% of organizations said that tracking costs and cloud cost allocation is burdensome and time-consuming, especially in tech industries, where 33% find it extremely burdensome.

“Gaining visibility into cloud costs is the first step for enterprises who want to optimize the cost of their cloud infrastructure,” said Scott Sinclair, Practice Director for ESG who led the research study. “Organizations need to operate on average 57% faster than three years ago. Trying to optimize cloud costs at that speed without the aid of a third-party tool leaves many enterprises ill-equipped to have total visibility into their cloud spend and cost attribution, especially for today’s modern architectures and containerized applications.

Sixty-one percent agree that they lack sufficient visibility into which teams own what cloud resources; this increases to 72% for the tech industry. Twenty-four percent of organizations who are considering making changes to their monitoring and observability practices are seeing their infrastructure costs scaling too quickly, leading to the need to make changes in their observability practices.

“The survey findings are consistent with our experience that enterprises are realizing significant ongoing savings from cloud cost optimization tools,” said Asim Razzaq, CEO, Yotascale. “Our customers have been able to see savings of up to 50% on their cloud costs and continue to see these benefits over time as Yotascale keeps up to date with infrastructure costs and usage. Cloud cost optimization isn’t something that you can cross off your to-do list. It is a dynamic process that requires continuous optimization, engineering empowerment and actionable recommendations based on data that teams can trust.”

Source: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2022/02/21/cloud-difficult-observability/