Bruce Busansky, Red Hat

Did you know that, based on Gartner research, around 30% of cloud spend is wasted? Another study by Forrester Consulting on behalf of HashiCorp (an infrastructure automation software company based in the US) found that 94% of organisations are wasting money in the cloud. Cloud budget overruns are fairly common and “avoidable” cloud spend comes down to four key areas:

“A lot of companies have bought these massive cloud datacentres in the sky and they’re fantastic. They aren’t affected by loadshedding and you don’t have to worry about where to get diesel from to keep them running 24-7. You can run a million different services and the more options that are available, the better,” says Bruce Busansky, a Red Hat application platform specialist. “And with the cloud, instead of waiting months for hardware to arrive, you can flick a switch, swipe a credit card and the hardware is there. These clouds are very good at delivering instant gratification. We’ve seen a lot of companies go really, really fast in the cloud and really, really big in the cloud…but then comes bill shock.”