These Organizations Struggle to Control Cloud Costs, Can Yours?

If your teams are having trouble making your company’s key apps work as economically in the public cloud as they do in traditional infrastructure you are far from alone.  We hear it over and over again in our conversations with Direct LTx customers, prospects, and contacts. 

Anecdotal data about runaway cloud costs abound in the tech field.  Despite all the cloud company marketing dollars, ad spending, and event sponsorships, there is greater public acknowledgement than ever before that the public cloud is an expensive option,  IDC, an IT research firm, has estimated that 20% to 30% of cloud spending is wasted.  

Public cloud costs are expensive even for companies that have significant purchasing power and high level tech talent.  Two line items in particular remain typical frustrations, egress fees and storage costs. That was true a decade ago and remains so today.  

For those projects involving partners or others outside of your organization, moving data in and out of the cloud is expensive.  In an illuminating CIO article, St Jude’s Research Hospital SVP and CIO Keith Perry touched on the issue of data sharing for research purposes.  “The academic community expects data to be close to its high-performance compute resources, so they struggle with these egress fees pretty regularly,” Perry said.  

St Jude’s is not alone.  The sharing and exporting of large data sets, a necessity in so many organizations, is a common issue with those trying to rein in cloud costs.  Storage is another. 

Storage costs were a factor in GEICO’s decision to repatriate from the public cloud to infrastructure under company control.   Rebecca Weekly, the insurer’s VP of platform and infrastructure engineering told The Stack, “we have a lot of data – and it turns out that storage in the cloud is one of the most expensive things you can do in the cloud, followed by AI in the cloud.”

If large, sophisticated organizations, with big budgets for technology, services, and talent have trouble getting the public cloud to make economic sense, how can the typical Eastern Pennsylvania enterprise, with  fewer resources and a smaller staff, expect to do better?  

Direct LTx published Cloud Challenges: Are Cloud Providers Like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure the Right Financial and Operational Fit for Your Business?  Its purpose was to examine the public cloud from all angles, with the experiences of Eastern Pennsylvania enterprises at the forefront.   This executive report can be obtained by clicking here.  Alternatively, you can have it sent to you directly by emailing strategy@directLTX.com.