Use of infrastructure as service is growing, but do users know what they’re doing in the cloud? Two critical analyses would suggest that they don’t.
Cloudyn is one of several usage assessment and optimization firms that have been started to serve cloud customers. These new companies often make a basic online service available for free, upping the ante with monthly charges once users discover how much they can learn from the monitoring and diagnostic services.
Cloudyn and another such firm, Cloudability, for example, charge $ 49 a month for usage analysis and reporting. The two paired up at Cloud Connect 2013, a UBM Tech event in Santa Clara, Calif., to offer snapshots of their customers’ cloud practices and how those practices could be improved.
Fifty-eight percent run their cloud applications in an uncontrolled fashion, changing the application frequently but not studying how well it’s running on its initially selected server and or figuring out where to run it for optimum cost effectiveness, said Cloudyn CEO Sharon Wagner in the session, “Best Practices in Cloud Optimization.”
“Eighty percent of instances are underutilized,” he said, suggesting that the IT practice of overprovisioning in the data center has carried over to the cloud. Fifteen percent were overusing their server instances, meaning customers were experiencing delays in getting responses or some traffic wasn’t able to access the business’s cloud application. A 15% over-utilization rate probably corresponds to a 7% loss of business, said Wagner.