Gartner predicts that by 2020 organizations that lack cloud cost management processes will on average overspend by 40 percent on the public cloud. It’s like letting your home utility costs get way out of control because there is no monitoring of usage nor efforts to conserve: You’ve kept your AC at 65 degrees during the summer and at 75 degrees during the winter. Eventually the bills come due—and they are big ones.

Most people in IT consider cloud computing services to be almost free, so they do very little to deal with ongoing cloud cost management or usage monitoring. That is, until they get that $300,000 bill.

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What’s changed since those first cloud deployments is that enterprises have gone from 5 percent of the workloads and databases running in the public cloud to about 30 percent by 2019. With the increased load on the public clouds comes increased usage billing, so it’s not unusual that enterprises get bills that are 30 to 40 percent higher than they expected or budgeted for.

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