With a recession looming and continuous economic uncertainty hovering, companies are looking for ways to cut costs. If they made it through the period of layoffs, now they’re turning to their tools to see where they can cut back and maximize usage of their resources. Looking into 2023, we’ll see many companies turning to cloud cost management and storage to help optimize costs and resources.
Cloud Cost Management Will Give Companies the Upper Hand
One trend that’s driving the need to cut costs is the desire to understand current cloud spend. In a recent State of Multi-Cloud Management 2022 report based on a survey of 360 cloud decision-makers in the U.S. and U.K., 82% of organizations surveyed are currently leveraging a multi-cloud strategy, and 78% of organizations surveyed have workloads deployed in more than three public clouds. As a result, companies are experiencing more multi-cloud challenges. And one of these challenges is the inability to have detailed insights on cloud spend – particularly unnecessary spend – and resource utilization. Because of this, cost and resource optimization will be key over the next 12 months.
By properly planning for cloud migration and organizing a cloud cost management strategy, organizations can achieve cost-cutting success. And as organizations start to drive towards cloud adoption maturity that is coupled with business pressure on reduced spend, the companies who have a proactive approach will have a significant upper hand in dealing with uncertainty.
Storage Growth Will Drive the Need for More Cost-Cutting Tools
But cloud management isn’t the only way organizations plan to cut costs in 2023. Hybrid cloud storage consumption is growing, yet cost-cutting tools are not quite there. Currently, most tools focus on compute storage, leaving organizations with soaring cloud storage costs that are growing at a faster rate than overall cloud spend. In 2023, organizations we’ve heard from will be looking to expand their cost-cutting measures from compute to storage.
SaaS Will Be All About Specialization
Lastly, as part of planning properly for cloud migration, understanding the business case for each cloud is crucial to a successful cloud presence. Most cloud providers have become comparable in basic capabilities, resulting in very little to differentiate them. The journey from here is going to be about specialization. Companies will need to dive deeper into the key value they are looking for and which cloud provider can provide it best. For example, for some AI and ML capabilities, there may be a specific cloud that has a significant upper hand, or for PaaS there could be another cloud that delivers a significant discount based on previous usage. For organizations to drive the value needed to stay competitive, it will be critical to have the right infrastructure and tools in place to effectively manage data and operations in a multi-cloud environment. Also, by assigning a role to each cloud, organizations can get the most out of that instance for each business case and task, optimizing tools, resources, and costs in the process.
2023 will be all about cutting costs and maximizing resources. But to truly make the most of their current tech stack, organizations must create cloud cost management strategies that identify the “why” behind being in the cloud. What is the purpose of each cloud instance? What is the strategy for migration? What about the cloud strategy post-migration? If organizations can answer these questions, identifying where and how much they’re spending will be much easier, giving cloud leaders confidence to adjust where it’s needed and head into 2023 with strong numbers and an enhanced cloud presence.