While cloud technologies are increasingly driving digital business transformation, there's a lot of room for cloud spending to be 'maximized,' according to a new report from CDW Canada, a provider of technology solutions and services for Canadian organizations.
The 2023 Hybrid Cloud Report explores emerging trends and the state of hybrid cloud for Canadian organizations.
CDW found that 18% of all public cloud services spending annually in Canada is not being maximized, highlighting a crucial area of opportunity for Canadian organizations to properly resource their plans for future business offerings. In other words, organizations may be wasting a lot of money by not optimizing their cloud spending, and that needs to change if they are to improve their ROI and reap the benefits of digital transformation.
To optimize cloud spending, organizations are turning to Financial Operations (FinOps), an evolving cloud financial management discipline designed to enable maximum business value -- or, figure out where the money's going and stem the bleeding.
The report found that just over half (55%) of Canadian organizations surveyed have an individual or team dedicated to FinOps and as with any new discipline, those responsible for it are experiencing growing pains.
The top cited challenges faced by the person or team performing IT FinOps around cloud expenditure are:
- Understanding how to optimize cloud spend for architectural and business benefit (42%)
- Allocating cloud costs to the correct team (40%)
- Understanding cloud price models and how to apply these optimally (39%)
In the beginning of the cloud era, IT teams and even individual developers were given free rein to order and provision cloud resources. Even today in the era of cloud-native development, there's not a lot of oversight into how those resources are utilized and how much they are costing organizations. Developers tend to overprovision, which can leave organizations on the hook for wasted resources. In a rough economic environment, organizations are looking to FinOps to check the excesses in the cloud.
This is a great opportunity for solution providers to provide best practices for hybrid, multi-cloud financial management to ensure organizations maximize their spending and reduce overages, according to the report.
