Organizations are wasting billions of dollars every year on unused cloud-based solutions, while also generating an outsized carbon footprint and risking damage to the internal reputation of IT departments.
This is according to a new report from StormForge, a Boston-based company that uses machine learning to reduce cloud waste in enterprise computing.
Polling 105 IT professionals for the report, StormForge found businesses spend roughly $17 billion each year on either unused or idle cloud resources. These unused resources are a “significant contributor” to global climate change, the report added, with the volume of greenhouse gas emitted by supporting data centers equalling the quantity generated by the entire airline industry.
The average organization wastes almost half (48 percent) of its cloud resources, the report uncovered. For most businesses (76 percent), reducing cloud waste is a major priority.
StormForge identified cloud complexity and over-provisioning to ensure application performance as the biggest causes of cloud waste, with Kubernetes being a “significant contributor” to the cloud complexity issue. According to the report, almost two-thirds (62 perncet9 agree Kubernetes is a major contributing factor.
Furthermore, just over a quarter of organizations (27 percent) are allocating their resources based on optimization recommendations from machine-learning tools.
Besides damaging IT’s reputation with the rest of the company, the report explained that cloud waste also reduces profitability.
