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A vast majority of enterprises globally are overspending in the cloud, according to a new HashiCorp-Forrester report.
In a survey that saw participation of over 1,000 IT decision makers across Asia Pacific, North America, Europe and Middle East, 94 per cent of respondents said their organisations had notable, avoidable cloud spend due to a combination of factors including under-used, over-provisioned resources, and lack of skills to utilise cloud infrastructure.
Under-used resources were among the top reasons behind overspending, the report showed, with more than 66 per cent of respondents listing it, followed by 59 per cent and 47 per cent of respondents claiming that over-provisioned resources and lack of needed skills accounted for the wastage, respectively.
Another 37 per cent of respondents also listed manual containerisation as a contributor to overspending in the cloud.
Nearly 60 per cent of respondents said they are already using multi-cloud infrastructures, with an additional 21 per cent saying they will be moving to such an architecture within the next 12 months. The report showed that a majority of enterprises surveyed were already using multi-cloud infrastructures.
Multi-cloud infrastructure works for most enterprises
Further, the report said that 90 per cent of respondents claimed a multi-cloud strategy is working for their enterprises. This contrasts with just 53 per cent of respondents claiming that such a strategy was working for them in last year’s survey.
Reliability was the major driver of multi-cloud adoption this year, with 46 per cent of respondents citing it as the top reason for adopting the computing architecture. Digital transformation came in second place this year, cited by 43 per cent of respondents as the main driver for the move to multi-cloud, slipping from first place last year.
Other factors driving multi-cloud adoption this year included scalability, security and governance, and cost reduction.
Almost 86 per cent of respondents claimed they are dependent on a cloud operations and strategy team, as they perform critical tasks such as standardising cloud services, creating and sharing best practices and policies, and centralising cloud security and compliance, the report showed.
Skill shortages were the top barrier to multi-cloud adoption, with 41 per cent of respondents listing it as the top reason. Some of the other barriers listed by respondents included teams working in silos, compliance, risk management and lack of training.
Additionally, almost 99 per cent of respondents said that infrastructure automation is important for multi-cloud operations as it can provide benefits such as faster, reliable self-service IT infrastructure, better security, and better utilisation of cloud resources, along with faster incident response.
Eighty-nine per cent of respondents said they see security as a key driver for multi-cloud success, with nearly 88 per cent of respondents claiming they already relied on security automation tools. Another 83 per cent of respondents said they already use some form of infrastructure as code and network infrastructure automation, according to the report.
