Public Cloud proving more expensive than expected

April 26, 2021

Public Cloud has been sold to many organisations, large and small on the promise of huge cost savings. The sales pitch was easy; why pay for all that equipment and maintain it yourself, when we can do all that for you on a massive scale and let you share it, to significantly reduce your costs?

And who wouldn’t be swayed by that argument? But now there is growing concern over Cloud spend, with an increasing number of organisations reporting their Public Cloud bills are bigger than expected and still rising.

As cloud adoption continues to rise, customers worried at the uncertainty of the cost of Public Cloud, are now spending time and effort to discover the services they do not think they are using that are actually helping to rack up the monthly bill.

This constant battle with their monthly bills is dampening their initial excitement at the switch from the CapEx investment to subscription model, which promised that moving workloads and applications to a hyper-scale Cloud vendor would save them money.

The situation was highlighted by a recent survey from the FinOps Foundation, a trade association dedicated to cloud financial management, which saw many of its members arguing that not only was the cost management of Public Cloud difficult, it’s trajectory appeared ever-upwards.

Respondents indicated 50% of compute spend on Public Cloud was for on-demand, by far the highest-priced service, with 49% for reserved, savings or committed use coverage, the next most costly option. Interestingly, only 13% was for spot instances, typically available at discounted rates.

Keeping a close eye on costs

Here at Dataquest, we understand the benefits of Hybrid Cloud, combining Private, Public and On-premises resources to deliver the most accurately tailored solution for any organisation, irrespective of its size or complexity, but cost uncertainty can be addressed with some thought.

In the first of these blogs on the subject we’ll look at one simple way to get your monthly Public Cloud costs under control, which starts with turning off stuff you’re not using. It sounds simple, but is easily overlooked when everything is running well.

There is no point running systems 24/7/365, if they only support work taking place in a single office, Monday to Friday, 9.00am to 5.30pm. You might have critical production systems you need to run all the time, but you can take advantage of the flexibility of Public Cloud computing to reduce costs.

And while we’re on the subject of your monthly bill for Public Cloud, look closely at it, as it may well indicate areas of improvement. If an app is not performing efficiently, it will cost more to run in the Cloud, which may not have shown up when you were running it on your own infrastructure.

Here at Dataquest, we have a myriad selection of tools to help you optimise your Cloud use, designed like our Private Cloud to deliver all the performance you need, whilst saving you money – we’ve done it for longer than most and understand the issue better than most.

If you would like to discuss your monthly Public Cloud bills and want a better alternative Private Cloud solution, please get in touch with me, Chris Baker, on 0333 800 8800 or email me at [email protected]