Poor architectural visibility leading to cloud cost blowout, report warns
Almost three quarters of global companies polled by integration and automation provider Boomi exceeded their cloud budgets last year – and solving perennial problems from excessive storage to overconsumption of bandwidth remains elusive in many cases.
The findings were in a report conducted alongside Forrester Research, which polled 420 cloud decision makers globally. While two thirds (65%) of respondents said they were prioritising cloud cost management and optimisation (CCMO) tactics earlier in the cloud development process, this rarely extended to proactive strategies at the earlier architectural level.
Four in 10 respondents said they contained costs at the solution architecture stage, while only 6% said their cloud cost remediation strategies were as proactive as possible. More than half of those polled (52%) admitted they did not have the strategy in place to sort excessive storage, with 42% affirming they could not solve bandwidth overconsumption. 44% of respondents said they lacked an integration strategy more generally.
Data management was seen as the most difficult area of cloud spend to track, based on current CCMO tooling. The second biggest concern was egress fees, an area of particular contention right now given the hyperscalers – Google Cloud in January, before Amazon Web Services and, latterly, Microsoft Azure in March – announced they were scrapping egress fees, albeit for customers leaving the platform altogether.
Things may get worse before they get better, the report warned. Respondents expected applications across IT ops – cited by 54% of those polled – and hybrid work (50%) to create further cloud cost headaches, as well as software creation platforms and tools (45%). 46% of those polled said emerging FinOps tools were as yet not producing expected visibility into costs.
More than two thirds (67%) of those polled said a solution akin to integration platform as a service (iPaaS) would help reduce overall cloud spend from the architecture stage. Not surprisingly, this is where Boomi comes in. Ed Macosky, chief product and technology officer at Boomi, said the research findings were a ‘clear example of integration being left out of the cloud cost equation.’
“When systems are disconnected and data is siloed, companies are only seeing part of their organisations’ cloud cost picture, and this lack of visibility impacts tracking and decision making,” said Macosky. “The problem is integration is being viewed as a separate entity, when it actually has significant potential to act as a control layer in the reckoning of cloud costs.”
Gartner estimated iPaaS to be the fastest-growing enterprise software segment in 2022, and as a result anyone who’s anyone in enterprise software has a finger in this pie. Alongside Boomi, the analyst firm’s most recent iPaaS Magic Quadrant features Informatica, Microsoft, MuleSoft, Oracle, SAP and Workato in the leaders’ zone.
You can read the full Boomi report here (email required).
Picture credit: “Coast Mole“, by “Northwest Power and Conservation Council“, used under CC BY 2.0
