A day of reckoning appears to be at hand over public cloud spending. The promise and exuberance of cloud computing have given way to disillusionment and a “hangover” of epic proportions over managing costs. A recent post by Martin Casado and Sarah Wang at Andreessen Horowitz provides some very interesting insights into cloud spending habits from 50 public software companies. Their conclusion was that in operating at scale, the cost of cloud could double a firm’s infrastructure bill. The analysis estimates that $100B of market value is being lost at just 50 of the top public software companies due to cloud impact on margins.
Even though this analysis looks at primarily cloud native unicorns like Dropbox and Snowflake, the insights still apply to mid-sized organizations feeling the pinch of ever-rising cloud expenditures. Cloud cost management is a universal problem and has been consistently for at least the top five years.
This challenge is highlighted in a recent Flexera 2021 State of the Cloud report, which placed optimizing cost savings as the top priority for executives for the fourth consecutive year.
But we are still racing to get rid of our on-premises footprints. In fact, I still get asked every few weeks, by some senior executive, “how do I get out of managing my own data center”? The challenge we face deals with the optimization of infrastructure while managing and predicting costs for cloud services and making sure we land the right workloads in the right place upfront and ongoing.
At Expedient, we want to help you Cloud Different™. We view cloud as an approach, not a destination. It is about getting the right applications and workloads running in the right workload location. In short, you need to optimize, optimize, and then optimize further. The launch of Expedient Cost CTRL does just that. It enables organizations to centralize and optimize their spending, regardless of what workload location is being used, including on-premises environments, on-site private clouds, VMware-based enterprise clouds, and hyperscale environments.
The beauty in our approach is that we provide clients a way to view the entirety of their cloud spend while optimizing current workload performance and predicting future spend with upfront cost estimates across all cloud environments. Our hallmark at Expedient is to provide best-in-class technology backed by white glove 24/7/365 service and support. Expedient Cost CTRL does just that.
We are at an interesting inflection point. IT spending on data center hardware and software remains flat at best while expenditures on cloud infrastructure services continue to skyrocket (See the Synergy Research graph below). This trend will no doubt continue but we’re seeing a definite shift and pushback against having workloads and applications run in hyperscale environments without doing a proper cost analysis.
Our latest offering is an attempt to not only get costs under control but to set the foundation for ongoing infrastructure performance optimization. It tackles the complexity of dealing with workloads spread across multiple clouds and locations while being managed by multiple teams. It also provides a line of sight into workloads that run outside a hyperscale cloud environment, so that clients get complete visibility across all workload locations. This depth of visibility and transparency, in turn, drives the infrastructure optimization of having the right applications and workloads running on the right cloud platform, every time. I’d love to hear your thoughts on Expedient Cost CTRL. I can be reached at Michael.Fulton@Expedient.com.
