FinOps gives hope to those struggling with cloud costs

Cloud workloads are continuing to grow — sometimes adding to traditional on-premises workloads, sometimes replacing them. The Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey 2023 shows that organizations expect the public cloud to account for 15% of their workloads by 2025, up from 12% today. When private cloud hosting and software as a service (SaaS) are included, this share rises to approximately one-third of their workloads by 2025.

As enterprise managers decide where to put their workloads, they need to weigh up the cost, security, performance, accountability, skills and other factors. Mission-critical workloads are the most challenging. Uptime Institute research suggests around two-thirds of organizations do not host their mission-critical applications in the cloud because of concerns around data security, regulation and compliance, and the cost or return on investment (ROI). Cost overruns are a particular concern: the deployment of new resource-hungry workloads means that unless organizations have better visibility and control over their cloud costs, this situation is only going to get worse.