Cloud spend - take back control

Get Akamai’s advice on optimizing public cloud expenditure while improving application performance

Sponsored Post The flexibility and convenience of the public cloud can come at a price, with large bills sometimes accumulating when provisioning is left unchecked and unaudited.

Flexera's 2024 State of the Cloud Report lays bare the problem, having surveyed 750 IT professionals and executive leaders representing enterprise companies headquartered predominantly in the US.

It found that nearly one-third of cloud customers spend over US$12m a year on public clouds such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, with another third shelling out between US$2.4m and US$12m a year. SaaS spending alone accounted for between US$600k and US$12m a year for two-thirds of the businesses polled, with 22 percent purchasing over US$12m of software services.

Akamai was no exception. But after recognizing aggressive growth in its own third-party cloud spend, the company subsequently managed to reduce its expenditure by 40 percent in a single year, with 70 percent of cost savings targeted by the end of 2024. And Akamai has produced a white paper offering advice for other organizations intent on cutting their own costs.

"Gaining Control Over Sky-high Cloud Costs" details five steps for optimizing public cloud spend while improving application performance. The first involves optimizing capital allocation against strategic investments, followed by mitigating cloud concentration and uncontrolled spending for business-critical applications.

It's equally important to be fully aware of the costs that any cloud-native workflow or application will generate over their lifetime and avoid any vendor lock-in which could ensue. Migration off-premise is not suitable for every workload, and isn't always easy or straightforward. So it's essential to have the full support of senior management responsible for funding it and make sure that CIOs and CFOs collaborate in assessing their use of cloud technologies and make sure they are a good fit for their business growth strategies.

These are just some of the lessons learned in Akamai's Project Cirrus initiative. You can read the rest in the full Akamai white paper by clicking this link.

Sponsored by Akamai.