TECHNOLOGY STRATEGY
John Bradshaw, Akamai’ s EMEA Chief Technology and Strategy Officer for Cloud Computing, sees this as a natural evolution in the cloud journey.“ We’ re now at the point where the rubber needs to meet the road, and you have to start seeing value come back from these investments,” he explains.“ What I think we’ ve seen up until now is people have really heavily invested in AI because that’ s been the thing that people have wanted to do, which is great and really helpful to help innovate and come up with new ideas. But we’ re now at a point where these have to be rationalised and turned into real business outcomes.”
This shift reflects broader maturation in the cloud market. According to CloudZero’ s State of Cloud Cost report, cloud waste averaged 30 % of companies’ cloud budgets in 2021, jumping to 32 % in 2022, suggesting that easy gains from cloud adoption have been captured, and organisations now need more sophisticated approaches to extract value.
The economics of escape The challenge facing many organisations is what John describes as the“ Jenga problem” – trying to extract value from complex, interdependent cloud systems without causing everything to collapse.“ If you’ ve made a bet on a single provider, a couple of providers, we’ re in this‘ multiple cloud’ type of world rather than multi-cloud, where you can use a bit of this database here from this provider, a bit of something here from this other one,” he notes.
This vendor lock-in issue is more than just a theoretical concern. The Akamai research shows that 41 % of businesses say the cost and complexity of migrating data and applications outweigh the potential benefits of switching providers. Meanwhile, 69 % of IT leaders saw budget overruns in 2023, with research by McKinsey & Company revealing that 75 % of cloud migrations exceed their budgets.
This challenge extends beyond technical complexity to fundamental business transformation. Over two-thirds( 68 %) of businesses report that increasing cloud costs are reducing budget for other areas, with new AI projects( 26 %), cybersecurity( 26 %) and IT staff costs( 24 %) among the most frequent casualties. One in five businesses now consider their cloud computing costs“ unmanageable”.
“ It’ s not that once you do cloud transformation you just stop. It’ s continuous transformation”
Syed Shabih Abbas, Senior Director, DXC Technology technologymagazine. com 89