Cloud implementations are becoming pervasive as a recent study by Apptio reports that more than 92 percent of IT leasers prefer to deploy to cloud rather than on-premise. On the surface this seems like a great way to reduce the dependence on local systems and the expenses associated with their purchase and maintenance. But the reality is that while cloud deployment is preferred, understanding the details of costs and usage still lags behind what IT understands about locally based infrastructure costs.

The same study by Apptio found that 41 percent of companies said the decisions they make about cloud deployment are done independently of consideration of what’s being done by the rest of the business. That’s partly because business units often make their own cloud purchase decisions independently and without consulting IT. The result is that 73 percent of respondents feel spending outside the purview of IT is creating cloud sprawl. IT is left without visibility into the full gamut of spending making it extremely difficult to make informed decisions or even understand how the organization is making use of cloud resources.

The challenge for IT is to optimize its use of all cloud resources across multiple business units, applications, and cloud providers. And that’s not all. They need to incorporate the current spend for on-premises systems. This increases the complexity of calculations of current spend patterns and makes planning for migration from on-premises infrastructure to cloud-based systems difficult.

Building a cohesive view

IT has solid experience understanding costs associated with on-premises computing platforms but incorporating cloud expenses into their overall spend calculation is made difficult because of the fractured view and complexity of invoices from cloud providers. When invoices stretch to thousands of lines of detail and usage varies minute by minute, attempting to adjust usage commitments after the fact can leave money on the table.

“Nearly all CIO organizations struggle to optimize cloud consumption. It’s helpful that there is a growing set of tools to help you learn how to best leverage cloud platform services and how to identify when your use is suboptimal and overly costly.” Said James Staten, VP at Forrester, in a recent blog post on Apptio’s cloud capabilities. “But this guidance would be far more effective if it could give you real-time insights so that no dollars are wasted.”

Apptio’s two-pronged approach to delivering real-time insights to IT delivers a comprehensive view of the enterprise hybrid cloud and lets IT connect the dots between cloud and on-premises down to the project level giving business unit managers better understanding of what services they are using across all platforms. Apptio Cloud Business Management (CBM) monitors all leading public cloud providers including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, and lets IT understand usage while Apptio’s Hybrid Business Management (HBM) tool combines cloud usage information from CBM with on-premises infrastructure usage data. The combination gives a consistent and comprehensive view of computing consumption so that IT can make more informed decisions about what systems to migrate to cloud bases systems and which to leave on-premises.

“As cloud permeates the enterprise, we see more and more business units requesting – or simply using – cloud services,” said Theo Beack, EVP of Products and Engineering at Apptio. “With fractured usage of cloud throughout a business, it’s hard to make informed decisions about important IT investments. Apptio for Cloud will empower IT leaders to ensure they are never wasting money on the public cloud and have the data needed to make smart migration decision. As a result, IT is able to focus on broader business priorities.”

Apptio is offering a free trial of Apptio Cloudability.