The hidden environmental cost of cloud waste

We all remember the original premise of cloud computing. You can run your datacenter more efficiently, you do not have to buy the head room in your datacenter to cater for spikes and you can only use what you need, when you need it, from a much more efficient provider. Fast forward two decades and the sheer convenience of cloud, the complexity of management, and its relentless pursuit of the next big thing, has meant that cloud consumers are wasting tremendous amounts datacenter capacity, and with that emitting tons of carbon.

It is estimated that on average about 30% of cloud spend is wasted. This could be anything ranging from incorrectly sized compute resources, to dark data and legacy systems. This report estimates that 52% percent of business' data in the cloud is dark data, and IDC estimated the total amount of wasted storage in 2025 to be upwards of 91 zettabytes. What all that has led to, is that cloud is now emitting more carbon emissions than the airline industry.

Of course humanity has gotten a lot of innovation from cloud in return, and even if we tried to go back, (and some companies are trying to go back to their own data centers) the horse has bolted. Cloud vendors have not made it easy to spot your waste, and why would they. Your waste drives their revenue. With the FOCUS cost management framework there is some positive movement in this space, but the onus is still remains with the customer.

In our view the only way to get back to the original promise of cloud, is relentless automated optimisation and management. This is why we felt the need to found Optimaze. Most enterprises have an intention/project/half-year-goal to reduce cost, but this is simply not going to lead to sustainable cloud usage, in every sense of the word. There are too many recurring activities when it comes to cloud management and at enterprise level, disparate teams have disparate goals. Continuous, granular, 100% cost attribution of all your cloud and affiliated technology spend is required, so your business can then start leveraging, customised driven insights, analytics and anomaly detection at the edge.

You will eliminate cloud waste in the process, which is likely to have one of the biggest impacts your business can have on its carbon footprint in 2025.