Advertising tycoon David Ogilvy famously remarked, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Replace the word “half” with “one-third” and “advertising” with “public cloud” and you’d describe what enterprises are grappling with right now. They know that not all of the cloud resources they’re paying for are being used, but they don’t know which ones those are.

COVID-19 certainly accelerated some trends. For example, in my view, COVID-19 accelerated the pace and progress of digital transformation by five to 10 years, as companies faced the need to adapt to a post-COVID-19 world, involving permanently the higher adoption of remote work, remote education, and digital touch-points. Technologies requiring less human touch and more digital touch-points will be adopted faster in the aftermath of COVID-19.

Did you know that CloudWisdom’s Bill Analysis tool shows you not just the services currently monitored by CloudWisdom but all services to deliver an overall view of your AWS cost? And if you’ve set up and configured consolidated billing to link multiple AWS accounts, you can include data from all those accounts in that view. You can even add multiple billing orgs to the same CloudWisdom account.

Virtana recently published the results of a new State of Hybrid Cloud survey. One of the findings is that 81% of companies in the study who have started their migration to the public cloud have engaged multiple providers. This result tallies with a recent Gartner survey of public cloud users, in which 81% of those respondents said they are working with two or more providers.

I believe that the evolution to hybrid cloud is inevitable. Not because it’s grabbing headlines, but because it mirrors the industry’s history of new technology adoption. Take the evolution of virtualization, for example. Going back 20 years give or take, virtual machines popularized by VMware, KVM, and Hyper-V started to gain traction.

Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 18.4% in 2021, with the cloud projected to make up 14.2% of the total global enterprise IT spending market in 2024, up from 9.1% in 2020, according to Gartner. Enterprises are, therefore, rightly concerned about controlling their public cloud costs—to ensure they’re getting all the value they’re paying for.

Cloud migration is, more often than not, treated as a one-way street where organizations migrate applications and workloads from on-premises to a public cloud, or less often, from one public cloud to another. But a key finding in our recent State of Hybrid Cloud survey of 350 IT professionals with cloud decision influence/authority is that a whopping 72% of participating organizations stated that they’ve had to move applications back on-premises after migrating them to the public cloud.