ITRS Group to help firms save 35% on cloud costs

By Sunniva Kolostyak

ITRS Group has launched Cloud Cost Optimisation (CCO), a solution to help firms cut their cloud spend, as businesses look to optimise spending during Covid-19.

The provider, which specialises in monitoring, optimisation and analytics software, found that the majority of companies are wasting approximately 35 per cent of cloud spend in a year, equating to $80 billion globally.

Many of ITRS’ tier one clients, mostly categorised as enterprise customers, have moved towards the cloud as part of their delivery platform. For most of them, cloud spend is becoming a significant part of overall spend, with the industry, now worth around $230 billion, growing about 20 per cent every year.

Speaking to IBS Intelligence, Guy Warren, CEO of ITRS Group, said the company has built the CCO tool on top of its capacity planning product to understand the capacity of clients’ cloud estate, and uses predictive analysis to model future scenarios in order to anticipate cloud usage.

“Industry data says that on average, 35 per cent of what is spent on the cloud is unnecessary. “We’re actually seeing significantly more than that, 60 per cent or more of what you spend on the cloud is wasted or unnecessary.”

In order to optimise cloud costs, the CCO tool analyses size, buying model and planning, Warren explained.

“Right size – shrink to fit is the best way of describing it, making sure you’re running the right size. Right-buying looks at what parts you are running for long hours. If you’re running over 100 hours in a week, then you really should do it on a reserved instance, meaning I’m going to prepay Amazon, Google or Microsoft, and they’ll give you a much cheaper price. Then you do any planning for change coming through on the next release.”

He continued: “That’s the three steps you have to do. If you just follow the middle step, you’ll save, but the savings are not as big as they should be.”

With the Covid-19 pandemic and the economic downturn, companies are increasingly looking to their cost base and deciding how to reduce it, and with cloud increasingly accounting for a large part of external costs, the savings could be significant.

“It is very timely. A lot of companies are going to default through the summer and the genuine economic recession will get worse. People will have to go to their cost basis to try and protect their profits,” Warren said.