EDITOR ’ S QUESTION
Organisations today are increasingly adopting a multi-cloud architecture that spans private and public clouds . This provides the necessary agility and flexibility of choice needed for IT teams to quickly fulfil business needs .
However , with workloads spanning public and private clouds , there is a strong need for centralised visibility across all clouds and robust cost governance policies , not least to keep overall IT spending within budget .
One key challenge in private cloud is the lack of immediate visibility into granular resource costs as opposed to public clouds that provide a highly granular breakdown of cost of all cloud resources based on consumption .
But there are many other factors to consider beyond the hardware and software infrastructure licenses when it comes to evaluating the cost of owning and running a private cloud . By way of example , the need for IT teams to have the ability to chargeback spending to business units with a unified public and private cloud cost report .
Illustrating the complexity of cloud environments , and therefore the challenges faced by organisations employing cloud operating models , is the Nutanix Cloud Usage Report , a report which provides detailed analysis of customer cloud spend in 2020 .
The report highlighted that in terms of cloud maturity , most customers are using more than 15 cloud services as part of their cloud consumption strategy , reflecting high maturity and adoption of cloud . Financial Services showed the highest cloud maturity , with Technology , Media and Telecom , Manufacturing and Retail close behind , but Healthcare still in the early adoption stage . across all segments , with 70 % of cloud spend coming from IaaS which consists of Compute , Network and Storage . Another observation from the report showed that enterprise customers are spending the most on analytics and emerging services , with the majority of that spend in Azure .
While keeping control of cloud spending remains high on the list of priorities for IT managers , cloud resource waste is a constant issue that cloud users need to control , with the overprovisioning of resources a habit that continues .
While rightsizing and eliminating unused resources can save 10 – 15 % of spend , rightsizing continues to be a challenge and even in the cloud world users are leaving their VMs and datastores with high unused capacity .
True costs can be surprisingly difficult for IT teams to estimate accurately in a complex data centre environment . However , by combining the ability of cost governance to private cloud environments ,
One key challenge in private cloud is the lack of immediate visibility into granular resource costs as opposed to public clouds that provide a highly granular breakdown of cost .
organisations can benefit from an accurate total cost of ownership ( TCO ) model , allowing them to monitor resource consumption , create and track budgets , and implement chargeback to increase accountability . p
In terms of cloud consumption by services , Compute continues to represent the largest service spend
JAMES STURROCK , DIRECTOR OF SYSTEMS ENGINEERING
WEURSSA , NUTANIX
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