By Michael Cade, Global Field CTO Cloud-Native Product Strategy at Veeam
While South Africa has fended off the threat of recession the global tech industry is still being cautious as it prepares to weather a storm.
Tech companies are looking at optimising their costs across the board, with one such area topping the list of CIOs’ being controlling cloud expenditure. The cloud’s recent fortunes have also been closely tied to the pandemic, with the market for cloud services more than doubling in just three years since 2020. So, if the pandemic bubble is truly over, is the cloud going to burst with it? Not necessarily, as cutting cloud costs doesn’t mean cutting back on the cloud altogether.
It might seem obvious, but at times it's worth reminding ourselves that optimising costs was one of the main reasons for adopting cloud strategies to begin with. And it's not simply a case of too much of a good thing - despite research indicating that 61% of South African organisations spent more on cloud solutions in 2021 than 2020, with the public cloud services market expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 24.5% through to 2025.
So, despite the cloud promising cheaper pastures, in reality, many CIOs are still waiting for the initial investment to pay off, but how has this happened?
Even though when leveraged correctly, the cloud can greatly reduce costs, it's important to remember that cloud providers aren’t in the business of saving you money. If you’re ordering from your favourite pizza chain, and adding extra topping after extra topping, they aren’t going to stop you and ask, “Are you sure you need all that?”
The cloud’s value is that you pay for what you need, but therein lies the issue - its flexibility is a double-edged sword. This has caught out many a CIO to the point where “bill shock,” a term once reserved for utilities, has become synonymous with cloud computing. Bills can scale out of hand not just because it's easier than ever to build out new environments, but because IT teams can often be focused on looking forward to what they will need next and not always looking back to what they don’t need anymore.