Organisations need ‘reality check’ on cloud costs, research advocates

How do you balance your cloud and on-premises budget – and how do you get the most out of it? It has long been a problem for organisations once they decide they want to move their systems to the cloud – and according to new research from SoftwareONE, companies continue to suffer from high costs and low visibility. The study, which polled 300 C-level and IT decision makers in North America, had some interesting data points alongside some less surprising results. More than half (53%) of those polled said they were looking at a hybrid approach to IT – a stat for the latter category. Yet a similar number (45%) said they were either increasing or maintaining their on-prem investments in the coming year. The problem is naturally built around cost and management. Even organisational budgets have discrepancies depending on who you talk to. On average, according to respondents, IT perceives its annual budget at $5.05 million, while the C suite sees it at $6.3m. What’s more, C-level sees 43% of their perceived budget going onto cloud services this year, where IT sees it more towards a third. On the management side, 42% of firms polled said they rely on external, third party software to manage cloud deployments. A quarter (26%) believe cloud pricing models were more complex than on-prem equivalents. A hybrid approach is therefore here to stay, with a four-phase application plan – retire, retain, re-host and re-platform – advocated. To avoid major cost headaches, the report argues that a fine grain approach to the architecture of applications is required – examining ‘how all aspects of the cloud can be used to finely engineer the on-premises applications to realise the maximum benefits.’