Businesses are struggling to keep track of their cloud spending

Businesses are adopting cloud services at a massive scale, but are struggling to keep track of their spending.

This is according to a new report from the FinOps Foundation, a non-profit trade association that seeks to establish industry standards for cloud financial management, as per a ZDNet report.

Polling more than 800 FinOps practitioners (people tasked with monitoring, measuring and mitigating cloud costs and value), the foundation found that almost half (49 per cent) had next to no automation in place for the management of cloud spend.

Of those that do automate some of the work, many (31 percent) use automated notifications and tagging (29 percent), while just above a tenth (13 percent) automate rightsizing and nine percent automate spot use.

“The dirty little secret of cloud spend is that the bill never really goes down,” says J.R. Storment, Executive Director of the FinOps Foundation. The report argues that companies are “likely missing opportunities to optimize cloud spend.”

Half of compute spend is taken up by the most expensive public cloud service, on-demand, while a similar percentage (49 percent) goes on reserved, savings or committed use coverage. Approximately one in eight spend budget on the cheapest feature: spot use.

Most organizations use AWS Cost Explorer, Cloudability, CloudHealth, Azure Cost Management, GCP Cost Tools or Cloudcheckr to manage their cloud costs, the report further claims.

Of all the different challenges, convincing engineers to action optimization recommendations was the most significant (40 percent), followed by shared costs (33 percent) and accurate forecasting spend (26 percent).

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