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Avoiding the Hidden Costs of Cloud Sprawl
Avoiding the Hidden Costs of Cloud Sprawl

Avoiding the Hidden Costs of Cloud Sprawl

  • Updated on January 17, 2025
  • /
  • 6 min read

By: Autumn Salama, Vice President of Cloud Operations, DataBank

IT Discovers More Cloud Sprawl

The sales manager calls the IT Help Desk: “Can you fix a problem with Salesforce?”

“We don’t use Salesforce,” the IT tech says….suspiciously.

“Sorry, I didn’t tell you,” the manager confesses. “We just signed up last week.”

Scenarios like this commonly occur across businesses of all sizes. End-users or business units decide they need a new application or a server. They tap into a cloud service with a credit card. Just like that, company data floats across the Internet.

As end-users independently adopt cloud services, these occurrences lead to the uncontrolled growth of cloud sprawl. With no central oversight, an inefficient IT environment emerges—with security risks and increased costs.

End-users don’t plan for these consequences. They simply want to address a need to help them do their jobs.

The Appeal of Hybrid IT Drives Cloud Sprawl

While cloud sprawl creates IT headaches, it’s driven by the benefits of a hybrid IT environment. No service provides a one-size-fits-all platform, infrastructure, or application. Each workload requires a different environment. These range from colocation data centers to public clouds, private clouds, and software-as-as-service (SaaS) offerings. That’s why many enterprises adopt a hybrid approach, comprising multiple environments and on-premises data centers.

Hybrid environments also make perfect sense for technology leaders. If you try to make all your workloads fit inside one cloud, some will suffer in performance. They may also operate inefficiently or fail to take advantage of all the features of a cloud offering. Some tools work only in specific cloud environments.

Unfortunately, the appeal of hybrid environments encourages cloud sprawl. Business users want to maximize the potential performance of their use-case workloads. However, sprawl can quickly lead to IT teams losing control as marketing, sales, human resources, and other teams all buy tools that suit their needs—also known as shadow IT.

The Costs of Cloud Sprawl

When IT does not centralize control to manage all the cloud services in play, bad things happen:

  • Sensitive information may not remain secure as users store, process, and move data across cloud services.
  • Enterprises see connectivity costs increase as cloud environments communicate and network circuits move data.
  • Businesses incur significant egress costs when migrating data among public cloud providers.
  • Unnecessary costs occur from redundant and under-utilized cloud resources.

Perhaps, the marketing team and the sales team use separate instances of the same CRM tool—rather than sharing the application. Together, they pay for 100 licenses but use only 50. The software development team uses a developer platform to build and test code but forget to shut it down after deploying the new application.

End-users also often need help to fix technical issues in the clouds they set up. IT teams may suffer from bandwidth fatigue. They may need to integrate cloud services or make changes to an application, and if the request requires a unique technical skillset, the company has to hire expensive consultant resources.

Solving the Challenge of Cloud Sprawl

To take on the challenge of cloud sprawl, begin with a comprehensive policy and processes to review cloud service vendors. When someone asks for a new tool, IT can check if the company already has one providing the same service.

For example, many companies use multiple collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Slack. Perhaps, one can deliver the required services.

In addition to vetting cloud service providers at the onboarding stage, review them regularly. Providers expand their offerings, so you may discover redundant services down the road. Instead of moving data between redundant tools, you can keep the data in one place.

Consolidation Improves Security

Another tactic to consider: Consolidate cloud environments to gain greater control over security. Each cloud provider deploys a wide range of security postures. Every time you move data in and out creates another risk of a security breach.

Plus, many data breaches occur through third-party cloud partners. According to Gartner, third-party risk is one of the driving forces behind the top cybersecurity trends. The more clouds, the more places you store data, the greater the potential risk.

This makes a solid security review process for vendors mandatory. You need to know which data sets you store and where, and you don’t want to silo any data.

No IT team wants to hamstring internal teams from doing their jobs. However, if you give these teams full autonomy to acquire tools and store data in the cloud, you introduce risk. The key is to balance that autonomy with the appropriate centralized controls.

The Benefits of Collaborating with a Managed Services Provider

Another strategy to contain cloud sprawl is to collaborate with a managed service provider. DataBank provides managed services for IT infrastructures with a hybrid services approach that allows enterprises to use our colocation data centers, bare metal servers, self-managed and Databank managed private clouds while also facilitating interconnection to other cloud providers.

Through cloud repatriation, you can consolidate multiple clouds into one physical location or across regional data centers with a single provider. This allows you to optimize workloads and avoid unintended costs, such as fees for transferring data.

Repatriation helps contain sprawl through consolidation that makes sense. Complimenting consolidation by leveraging hybrid cloud management tools that manage licenses and track the usage as well as the spend of SaaS applications and public cloud platforms can also aide in optimizing your hybrid cloud environment.

Staying Ahead of Business Needs

The challenge of managing cloud sprawl and the security risks will continue to expand as business users run their data through AI models. Cloud sprawl often occurs because the available internal tools don’t meet the needs of the business.

IT can counter this trend by staying ahead of their organizations. If you proactively offer tools (such as AI) and augment existing tools, end-users, likely, will give them a try. They won’t look for tools on their own.

By addressing their needs ahead of time, you also gain the ability to centralize and control all IT services—and avoid unnecessary cloud sprawl.

Learn more about tapping into managed services from your colocation provider to save money and start controlling your cloud sprawl by contacting DataBank today.


About the Author

Autumn Salama

Autumn Salama

Vice President of Cloud Operations

Autumn Salama is a seasoned technology executive currently serving as the Vice President of Cloud Operations at DataBank since May 2023. In this role, she oversees the management, delivery, and optimization of DataBank's cloud infrastructure.

Prior to joining DataBank, Autumn held several key leadership positions, including Chief Integration Officer at Evolve IP, Vice President of Service Delivery at Secure-24 and Vice President of Cloud Operations at Symmetry™. Across the span of two decades in the data center, cloud and managed services industry Autumn has been responsible for everything from support, delivery, engineering and product organizations making her a well rounded leader who understands the importance of solving her customers problems.

Her career began with roles at Photobucket and Data393. Autumn holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Information Systems from Metropolitan State University of Denver and an Associate of Applied Science in Networking and Web Design from Red Rocks Community College. Her extensive experience and educational background have equipped her with a comprehensive understanding of cloud and technical operations, making her a valuable asset to DataBank's leadership team.

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