Businesses are still spending too much on cloud computing services and there is an opportunity for the channel to help them get on top of the situation.
Research from Couchbase found that enterprises are over-spending by more than $8.75m on cloud services, with inflexible pricing and a lack of robust data management tools contibuting to the problem.
Those issues and the resulting overspend signal an opportunity for the channel to spark a conversation with users.
“Service providers shouldn’t see this as a rebuke, but as an opportunity,” said Huw Owen, vice-president and general manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at Couchbase. “The appetite for the cloud is there, and apparently bottomless – what we can see here are clear ways for providers to differentiate themselves by removing the final obstacles to the cloud living up to organisations’ ambitions.”
The research revealed that cloud services were not meeting expectations for many users, with a number of customers reporting that cloud complexities made digital transformation projects more difficult to implement.
There was also a feeling that if they were armed with better insights, the millions of pounds of overspending could be reduced. The channel might want to have a look at the pricing packages they can offer, with inflexible plans also coming in for criticism from customers.
The final point coming out of the Couchbase research was the challenges that enterprises were facing through service limitations, with a high number (61%) veing forced to clip their wings around transformation plans because they could not lean on cloud services at scale.
“If enterprises raise their expectations and cloud service providers address inefficiencies, they could open up new opportunities for digital transformation”
Ravi Mayuram, Couchbase
Despite these issues, customers quizzed by the vendor made it clear that moving to the cloud was “inevitable”, with almost all enterprises putting more infrastructure into hosted environments.
“There’s no denying the impact of the cloud, from giving large enterprises increased scalability and agility, to giving smaller enterprises access to services and applications they could never implement in-house,” said Ravi Mayuram, chief technology officer at Couchbase.
“Businesses believe they are getting what they need, or else we wouldn’t be seeing this seemingly unstoppable momentum. The question is whether they could be getting even more – $8.75m is too much to just be a cost of doing business. If enterprises raise their expectations and service providers address inefficiencies, they could open up new opportunities for digital transformation – or simply reduce their costs,” he added.
“If costs and concerns keep mounting, we will see more organisations struggling to meet their overall business ambitions,” continued Mayuram. “The key to a lot of these concerns, and the additional costs enterprises are facing, is sprawl. The more control cloud customers have over their data, including where it is stored and how it is managed, the more confident they will be that it is secure, that their services are future-proofed, and that they have costs under control.”
