Survey Finds Many Companies Do Little or No Management of Cloud Spending  

By John P. Desmond, AI Trends Editor    
Cloud computing “sticker shock” is on the rise as the monthly bills come in, the customers may not be sure what they are paying for, and the bills are trending upwards.  
J.R. Storment, executive director, the FinOps Foundation That was a finding of a recent survey by the  FinOps Foundation,  a non-profit trade association focused on cloud financial management best practices, of more than 800 FinOps practitioners spending $45 billion collectively on cloud computing. (FinOps is short for cloud financial management.)   “The dirty little secret of cloud spend is that the bill never really goes down,” stated J.R. Storment, executive director of the FinOps Foundation, in an account in  ZDNet.   
Nearly half of survey respondents (49 % ) had little or no automation of managing cloud spend. Of those with some automation, almost one-third automated notifications (31 % ) and tagging hygiene (2 9 % ) .  Only 13 %  automated rightsizing and  nine percent, spot use. This “indicates that companies are likely missing opportunities to optimize cloud spend,” the survey’s authors noted.  
The highest-price cloud service, on-demand, consumed half of computer spend on the public cloud, the survey found. The next costliest option, committed use, was used by 49 %  of responses. The least expensive service, spot use, was practiced by 13 %  of respondents.  
Cloud Management Tools Used by Survey Respondents    
The tools the respondents used most often for managing cloud costs included: AWS Cost Explorer, Cloudability from Apptio, CloudHealth from VMWare, Azure Cost Management from Microsoft, Google Cloud Platform Cost Tools and CloudCheckr, with a product of the same name.     
About half the respondents used native cloud tools as their primary technology, while 43 %  used a third-party platform and 11 %  used homegrown tools. Many FinOps practitioners rely on data collection, collation and analysis with spreadsheets.     
Reflecting that cloud financial management is currently in an early stage, the survey respondents predicted over 40 %  growth in FinOps team size in the next 12 months.   
For AWS and Microsoft Azure, cloud customers are charged for the resources they order whether they use them or not, according to an account from  CloudCheckr . In a recent report, Gartner analysts Brandon Medford and Craig Lowery estimate that as much as 70 %  of cloud costs are wasted.     
Suggestions the company offered for managing cloud computing costs included:     

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