Why cloud is a budget breaker
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Misunderstandings about cloud security, scalability and storage has led to the vast majority of enterprises spending much more than anticipated, a new survey finds.
For many enterprises, cloud computing has turned out to be much more expensive than they expected.
Thanks to misunderstandings about security, scalability and storage, 94% of enterprises, including government and public sector organizations, incurred an average overspend of 43%, according to a recent report from Veritas Technologies.
In the global survey of 1,500 technology and IT decision-makers, many said that what they pay for public cloud services is surpassing their allocated cloud budgets, primarily because of miscalculations related to the security and storage services they needed.
Some respondents did not understand that cloud service providers are primarily responsible for the resilience of the cloud and not the clients’ data and applications, so they found themselves either paying extra for protection or falling victim to an attack on their cloud environment.
According to the survey, 99% of respondents believed that their CSP would be responsible for protecting some of their assets in the cloud, and 89% said their organizations had experienced a ransomware attack. Overall, three-quarters of respondents agreed that current offerings from CSPs fall short of their organization’s security needs.
Just over half reported they lost data because they relied on the backup tools provided by their CSP, and 40% cited backup and recovery as the leading area of overspend.
“While a well-known potential benefit of the cloud is cost savings, lackluster data management in multicloud environments can quickly contribute to these ballooning costs,” said Kevin Youngquist, vice president of U.S. public sector at Veritas.
“Public sector organizations need to accept the reality that they’re responsible for the management and protection of their data and applications in cloud [and] recognize that CSP tools for data management and protection are not enough,” he said. By deploying multicloud backup, recovery and storage tools, agencies can “simplify data management and improve data protection in the cloud [and] … reduce their cloud costs at the same time.”