Control your cloud spend without holding back your business

The upsides of cloud are well known, releasing the innovation inside your business, transforming how you deliver services and letting you reach your end-users faster and in more creative ways.

The downsides however don’t often make the headlines. Too often we hear the same issues being raised by procurement and finance departments across the land “why is our bill spiralling”, “who authorised this”, “which department bought this service”.

In our experience nearly every enterprise cloud consumer is wasting between 20% to 70% of their cloud spend, with the average being more than 35% in a typical mid-sized IT environment.

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So what are the top 10 biggest areas of cloud wastage?

Top areas of cloud spend wastage

1. “Lift and shift”

In an ideal world, you would optimise before migrating to a new cloud platform – but not every organisation has the luxury of endless time or dual running budgets. 

2. Unused & inactive!

In the same way the cloud makes it easy to spin up compute resources, it’s just as easy to forget about them. You pay for your cloud infrastructure whether you use it or not. 

3. Instance over-sizing

This one’s a bigger culprit than you might expect! In the cloud era, too many developers still have a legacy mindset when sizing compute resources.

4. Failing to review pricing

It’s critical that you stay on top of your cloud providers pricing options as these change on an increasingly frequent basis, not only with new offerings but also with new commercial models. 

5. Ignoring storage & data protection costs

Just like with on-premise platforms, storage is a large cost in the cloud, with persistent storage volumes being a large cost line in any cloud budget. 

6. Failing to innovate

In our opinion, one of the greatest benefits of public cloud is the wealth of innovation the providers and 3rd party providers bring. 

7. Eyes on governance

Governance and visibility are two growing issues. Knowing who you are spending with, and who is consuming resource (often outside the controls of procurement and finance) are huge problems. 

8. Data Transfer & bandwidth

The cost of transferring data into your cloud is usually free. But transferring it out is another matter altogether. 

9. Going it alone

This might sound like a bad sales pitch, but don’t go it alone, there are plenty of partners who can help you on your journey. 

10. Simplify cloud with analytics

Are you using massive spreadsheets to track and manage cloud spend? If yes, please stop! Save your team this pain and automate the process with a tool that lets you allocate, track cloud spend, creates automated budget reviews and more.


DataVita offer a range of optimisation services designed to help you with getting your cloud spend under control.

Including a free 30-day assessment to show exactly where you need to focus to start achieving savings today.