35 percent of cloud computing spending is wasted, says RightScale

Roughly 35 percent of cloud computing spending is wasted via instances that are over provisioned and not optimized, according to RightScale, which manages multiple services such as Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services.

The data, compiled through RightScale's cloud cost optimization service, boils down like this:

• 76 percent of cloud spending is compute with 15 percent database. Network is 3 percent of cloud spend followed by 2 percent on storage and 4 percent "other."
• Spending on instances is up 76 percent from the beginning of the year.
• Spending on Amazon RDS is starting to pick up.
• The majority of enterprises are running instances 24/7.
• 39 percent of instance spend is on virtual machines running at less than 40 percent of CPU and memory utilization.
• Only 19 percent of AWS instances are reserved.
• Companies don't clean up storage that isn't being used and 7 percent of cloud spending is wasted on unattached storage and old snapshots.

SEE: Cloud computing policy template (Tech Pro Research)

RightScale's data is notable and worth mentioning along with the concept of serverless services such as AWS Lambda. While those managed services may be more expensive on the surface, the efficiencies gained could be worth it.

Bottom line: Enterprises need to pay more attention to governance, utilization management, scheduling, autoscaling, storage policies and reserved instance planning.

TechRepublic: How Amazon is planning for the second decade of the cloud revolution

Also see:

• AWS public cloud is twice as big as Microsoft, Google, IBM combined
• AWS cloud costs: Amazon hopes these tools can help fight budget blowouts
• AWS, VMWare announce strategic partnership, new hybrid cloud service