Is it okay to overpay millions for multi-cloud infrastructure in order to innovate?

The statistics above tell a clear and concise story—organizations have flocked to public cloud under the promise of unlimited resource elasticity & availability, less maintenance, and a more operationally friendly approach to paying for resources. What emerged, instead, is a tangled web of disconnected data and limited views fraught with manual processes, human errors, and wasted spending. 

How did we get here? 

Back in the olden days, on-premises resources were easily controlled, delivered, and managed. There were a finite number of resources, and they could be tracked, assigned, and reclaimed. As we transitioned to public clouds, the workloads grew, resource consumption grew, and we relied more and more on public clouds to provide the tracking and cost visibility we needed to monitor consumption and chargeback to the organization. But it wasn’t enough… 

…So, we bought tools 

Tools to auto-tag, provision & de-provision, track usage, and maybe even offer some optimization recommendations for both private and public clouds. But we had to integrate every resource to those same tools for them to provide the benefits. Not only was it the initial integrations (many of which were custom-coded), but ongoing integration maintenance throughout the life of the tools and the resources that continue to drain costs and time. But still, it wasn’t enough.

Delivery too long, Shadow IT born 

Irrespective of whether you had tools to help or not when delivery times are measured in days and weeks and not hours and minutes, the people needing the compute resources will find a faster way. Developers, engineers, and architects began going straight to public cloud for resources, bypassing IT, and creating a “shadow IT” blind spot for the business.  

Cannot See What’s Not Connected 

Shadow IT and Shadow Tool usage make visibility, security, scale, and optimization near impossible. You can only track what you know about. The adoption of preferred tools by varying groups makes the problem worse. Popular open-source tools like Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, Chef, OpenShift, and others perpetuate the problem – especially in cases where they are not standardized, centralized, and approved. 

Manual Views Are Limiting 

Some organizations have teams of analysts reviewing cloud spending, parsing data, aggregating data, and delivering customized reports to key stakeholders. But they are often full of 2 weeks old data at best. Imagine having to manually aggregate resource usage among AWS, Azure, AND on-prem Center all at once? Three places that each report their usage differently. How easy is it to manually enter the wrong value and how can organizations expect to tie it all together in a way that provides true visibility and actionability? Even with effective systems and better than average manual processes, most organizations are flying blind when it comes to IT resource usage, tracking, and optimization. 

Is Excessive Cloud Spend Just the Cost of Innovation? 

And now we get to the important aspect—most organizations are highly inefficient in their cloud use. But many simply accept this as the cost of doing business. Or said another way, they allow the blind spots and known resource overspending and chalk that up to the cost of innovation or finding new ways to solve customers’ problems.  

In a few real-world cases, CloudBolt has identified $6 million and even $36 million respectively in cloud spending waste for organizations, the customer had previously been absorbing that expense as simply the cost of innovation. Because there was no effortless way to see and resolve the inefficiency, the organizations just accepted the cost and overlooked it because they believed the benefit of making progress on key initiatives justified the expense. I must imagine these organizations are not alone—many of you reading this blog may have a comparable situation or perspective.  

Conclusion 

As I stated before, 8 out of 10 Global IT Professionals agree that they suffer from: 

  • Poor visibility into who is using what resources and when 
  • Cannot get a comprehensive view across all clouds
  • Existing tools are simply not helpful enough. 

Almost 9 out of 10 (88%) want an overarching solution for their hybrid cloud/multi-cloud strategies2. One in which on-prem and public resources all get plugged in. Where open-source tooling is encouraged and unified, enabling choice to different departments and groups. Where automation brings resources in minutes and does it without special knowledge or expertise. 

CloudBolt has been evolving its hybrid cloud management approach for years. We’ve combined cloud management with cost management and resource optimization because it makes sense – everyone MUST have BOTH. Additionally, the ability to integrate is critical. It’s super difficult to be a ‘manager of managers’ if you’re proprietary, closed architecture with a shallow library of connectors. See why the CloudBolt Framework is a refreshingly honest and uniquely revolutionary set of capabilities designed to simplify and optimize today’s multi-cloud, multi-tool environments. 

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