4 Top Reasons for Cloud Spend Wastage
Common Causes of Wasted Cloud Spend
Harshal Sawant
AVP, CitiusTech
June 23
Article
Insights
- Healthcare businesses are falling short of realizing the cloud's full potential, witnessing a rise in wasted cloud spending.
- Effectively managing cloud expenditures, analyzing cost breakdowns, and benchmarking usage against industry standards are key approaches to optimizing cloud spending.
- By utilizing the FinOps framework, healthcare organizations can avoid wasteful cloud spending and maximize their cloud investments.
The healthcare industry has been gradually embracing cloud technology for some time now. However, until the first half of the previous decade, only a few prominent healthcare providers adopted it due to its complexity and resource demands. But in recent years, there has been a notable shift in this pattern, as cloud computing initiatives have become more prevalent across the healthcare sector.
A recent study states, “70% of healthcare businesses have adopted cloud solutions, and an additional 20% are planning to do so in the near future."
As healthcare enterprises continue embracing cloud technology, they face challenges with optimizing cloud usage and scaling their deployments, which are essential for staying competitive. Implementing cloud adoption initiatives without proper planning and management can result in efficiency loss, revenue leakage, and wasteful spending.
Here are some of the top reasons for cloud spend wastage by healthcare businesses.
Cloud service providers typically offer various pricing models, such as pay-as-you-go, reserved instances, spot instances, etc. Each pricing model has its own advantages and disadvantages and selecting the wrong model can lead to unforeseen expenses.
When healthcare organizations utilize multiple cloud service providers, each provider may have different billing models, cost structures, and pricing. This can make it difficult to compare costs across providers, making it challenging to determine which provider offers the best value for a specific service. Additionally, different providers may have varying levels of transparency and reporting for costs, making it more difficult for healthcare organizations to assess overall cloud costs accurately.
Healthcare data can be stored in the cloud with different levels of accessibility, durability, and performance, each with its corresponding price. For instance, standard storage may provide higher accessibility but lower durability at increased costs, while infrequent access storage may offer higher durability but lower accessibility at a lower price. By not optimizing storage classes for different data types, healthcare organizations may end up paying more for unnecessary storage.
Healthcare organizations often have complex cloud environments comprising numerous resources, such as virtual machines, databases, and storage systems. These resources may require frequent modifications, such as scaling up or down, to meet changing demands or address performance issues, leading to unnecessary expenses.
Track and Redirect: Going Beyond Cloud Cost Optimization
Cost optimization is one aspect of effectively managing cloud spending for healthcare businesses; they must also encourage individual accountability, ensure that cloud cost expenditures are clearly visible, enable collaborative behavior, and focus on business value for various healthcare-specific use cases.
Further, following best practices for benchmarking and comparing cloud usage and expenses against industry standards can help healthcare firms make informed decisions -regarding cloud resources. Additionally, using data-driven insights empowers healthcare organizations to optimize their cloud resources and align them with their clinical and operational needs more efficiently. This entails identifying areas where overspending or underutilization of resources may occur and strategically adjusting strategies to ensure maximum value.
Conclusion
Due to the intricate nature of cloud environments, healthcare firms often encounter difficulties when establishing a budget for integrating their cloud infrastructure. Furthermore, the lack of specialized skills and expertise required leads to ineffective use of cloud resources and increased expenses. However, healthcare companies can develop a well-defined roadmap for cloud integration by leveraging CitiusTech’s extensive knowledge and scalable solutions. They can even get assistance in organizing their cloud resources across various business units while providing real-time monitoring and management of their cloud operations.
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Cloud Cost Optimization: Common Causes of Wasted Cloud Spend by Healthcare Businesses