What Does Cloud Waste Mean?
Cloud waste is what happens when cloud services remain unused or underused. Cloud waste is becoming an important concern for companies that lease software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud services from public cloud providers.
Cloud waste often occurs when employees overestimate what services will be required to support a specific business goal. In a large corporation, when multiple business divisions use their own budgets to purchase cloud services, it’s easy for cloud waste to go unnoticed. The IT research firm Gartner estimates that in 2021, cloud waste cost businesses approximately $26.6 billion.
Cloud waste is often the result of:
- Overprovisioning.
- Purchasing services for a longer time period than actually needed.
- Duplicate purchases within the same organization for similar types of cloud services.
- Failing to deprovision orphan resources.
- Inadequate focus on cloud maintenance and cloud optimization.
SaaS sprawl and other types of cloud waste can be a labor-intensive burden as well as a financial one. Setting up automation capabilities to relieve DevOps teams from manually identifying waste can ensure this type of maintenance task is taken care of more efficiently, thoroughly and with greater accuracy.