If you’re stressing over cloud cost increases, you’re not alone. Three out of every five organizations saw cloud spending increase in the past year, with nearly four in 10 who experienced price hikes saying their costs jumped by more than 25% — this according to a recent survey of IT professionals commissioned by cloud provider Civo. Several factors appear to be driving cloud cost increases, including inflation, a rush to deploy compute-hungry AI, and energy costs, says Mark Boost, CEO of Civo, which bills itself as a low-cost competitor to the big three hyperscalers. Some cloud providers also have “complex and opaque” pricing structures, Boost claims, adding that, in some cases, cloud providers charge customers for volumes that aren’t automatically removed when instances are deleted and for data transfers between cloud services and regions. In addition, many companies are moving larger and more complex workloads to the cloud, says Mayank Bhargava, vice president and cloud modernization practice leader at CGI, a business and IT consulting firm. “As organizations continue their digital transformation journeys, they are migrating more critical workloads and data to the cloud, which naturally leads to higher costs,” he says. Another factor is the use of multiple cloud providers, Bhargava says. “As companies embrace multicloud strategies to avoid vendor lock-in and ensure business continuity, they often face challenges in managing and optimizing costs across different platforms,” he adds. Cloud costs have risen for many of CGI’s customers in the past year. Sunrise Banks, which operates community banks and a fintech service, has also seen cloud costs increase recently, says CIO Jon Sandoval. The company is a recent convert to cloud computing; it replaced its own data centers with the cloud just over a year ago, he says.
About OODA Analyst
OODA is comprised of a unique team of international experts capable of providing advanced intelligence and analysis, strategy and planning support, risk and threat management, training, decision support, crisis response, and security services to global corporations and governments.