In an era of inflation and tightening belts, you don’t want to spend any more on technology than is necessary to meet your goals.

But when your infrastructure is on the cloud, it can be all too easy to lean too hard on resources that aren’t giving you any value back.

Now might be a time to reassess your spending.

What’s the Problem?

Simply put, cloud overspending is a rampant problem, as a recent study points out.

A HashiCorp-Forrester report noted that 94 percent of enterprise organizations worldwide had sizable cloud expenses that were otherwise avoidable.

Some of the biggest problems, per the survey, came in the form of underutilized resources (seen by 66 percent of respondents), overprovisioned resources (59 percent), and a lack of skills needed to correctly manage the infrastructure (47 percent).

Just 6 percent of respondents stated they did not have any avoidable cloud spend.

This is not a new problem—but it is one that can add up, based on the size of the infrastructure you manage offsite. And with inflation having an impact on IT spending, it could be a big problem down the road, to the tune of thousands of dollars a year.

What’s the Solution?

“Fortunately, awareness of cloud waste is the first step to bringing it under control,” as the HashiCorp report puts it.

As a 2020 Associations Now piece notes, one of the first things you should do to handle this situation is to get clarity on what your bills state—which may not always be easy in the cloud-driven world. (One company highlighted in the piece, AvePoint, actually went so far as to develop an in-house tool to manage costs.)

The secret here is to spend efficiently on cloud, sunsetting provisioning that has run its course, and to be mindful to spend on cloud services thoughtfully.

That can be a big challenge at a time when many companies actually expect their cloud spending to increase to some degree—even as many other types of IT spending are on the table. But eyeing efficiencies can go a long way, according to TechTarget.

“Start with an assessment of your cloud provider’s transfer fees. Then, adjust your cloud architecture to reduce the number of necessary data transfers,” authors Sarah Neenan and Stephen J. Bigelow explained. “For example, you could move on-premises applications that frequently access cloud-hosted data into the cloud to eliminate those hops.”

The cloud likely won’t be your only IT pressure point, but it’s a great place to start.

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