Over a quarter of global cloud spend is wasted, according to Flexera’s 2020 State of the Cloud Report, which is based on a survey of of 750 executives from businesses across the globe. The study found that spend went over budget by an average of 23%. Despite this, these same business leaders expect their investments in cloud to continue to increase going forward. So what are they doing to minimise cloud wastage?

“With employees working from home and more business interactions going digital,” said Jim Ryan, president and CEO of Flexera when the report was released. In 2020, more than half of enterprise respondents said their cloud usage would be higher than originally planned at the beginning of the year due to the pandemic. Companies may have planned to migrate more services to cloud, yet they’re already exceeding cloud budgets, Ryan continued. “They will need to focus on optimising workloads as they migrate in addition to cost management and governance to ensure operational efficiency.”

How do they get this optimisation and cost management right? It all starts with understanding the problem. Below, we’ve put together an infographic detailing everything you need to know about cloud wastage and how to avoid it. Take a look.